


Ordinary Nations

by Melyanna (darthmelyanna)



Series: west-gate: A West Wing/Stargate Crossover [14]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, The West Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 11:54:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17600870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darthmelyanna/pseuds/Melyanna
Summary: A diplomatic mission goes awry, leaving Ellie Bartlet and John Sheppard to deal with Atlantis in crisis while Weir and Lorne are missing, in a situation all too reminiscent of Elizabeth's experience in the Peruvian Andes fourteen years earlier.





	1. Chapter 1

It had been a quiet day, almost criminally calm. These kinds of days made John Sheppard nervous and edgy, wondering when something was going to blow up – literally or otherwise.

“Colonel Sheppard,” said Ellie Bartlet, walking out of a lab as John passed the open door. “Got a minute?”

“Walk with me,” he replied. “What’ve you got, Doc?”

“First, please tell me you’ve never called your wife that.”

“Once, about a year before we got married,” he said, grinning. “She hit me.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“So, what’ve you got?”

“I’ve got a meeting tomorrow morning with the new group of officers, and I’d like to have someone from the military contingent there with me,” Ellie said as they turned a corner. “I’m just not entirely familiar with all the jargon and protocol, and I’d rather not fly solo through it.”

“Get your boyfriend to sit in on it.”

“Colonel Lorne is scheduled to go off-world an hour before this meeting starts,” she reminded him. It sounded a little odd to hear Ellie refer to her boyfriend of three years so formally, but ever since her promotion to deputy director a year earlier, she and Lorne had followed his and Elizabeth’s example of not calling each other by first name while working.

“Oh, that’s right. He’s off to P77-469 with Dr. Weir,” John replied. “Do you want me to sit in, or should I send someone with better sense of protocol than Cadman?”

Ellie laughed. “You can delegate. Won’t hurt my feelings.”

“All right. Anything else?”

“Dr. Weir wanted me to give these to you,” she said, handing over some papers as they started up a flight of stairs. “Duty rosters for the next couple weeks. She had some concerns about balance. Thought there had to be a mistake. You’ve got four or five teams scheduled to do what looks like the work of eight or ten teams.”

John shuffled the first page back. “Yeah, that’s a mistake,” he said. “Must have hit the wrong button. I’ll fix it before the schedule’s posted for the public.”

“I’ll let her know.”

“Anything else?” he asked as they arrived on the landing.

Before Ellie could answer, Marcus Lorne approached them from above. “Sorry to interrupt, Dr. Bartlet,” he said. “Colonel Sheppard, have you got a minute?”

John looked at Ellie. “Was that it?”

“We’re meeting in. . . fifteen minutes,” Ellie replied, glancing at her watch. “The rest can wait.”

“All right. I’ll see you there.” John nodded to dismiss her, and she headed back down the stairs. “You need something, Lorne?” he asked.

“I had that, uh, meeting with Dr. Weir just now,” Lorne said as they walked through the control room.

“Meeting? Oh, right.” “Meeting” had become something of a euphemism. For several years, John had tried on and off to get Elizabeth agree to learn how to fire a gun properly. He’d long since resigned himself to the fact that she’d never agree to carry one, but he’d finally convinced her to let Lorne take her through the basics, so if push came to shove, she wouldn’t be completely in the dark. The first lesson had been that afternoon.

Crossing the catwalk into Elizabeth’s office, Lorne said, “Sheppard, are you sure she’s never fired a gun before?”

“Of course she hasn’t,” he replied, looking at the last of the papers Ellie had handed him. “What makes you think she has?”

“She’s too good at this to be a beginner.”

That got John’s attention. He stopped walking next to Elizabeth’s desk and stared at his subordinate. “What?”

“Listen, there’s natural talent and there’s technique,” Lorne explained. “You know that. But I’ve taught a lot of the civilians here how to handle firearms. I can tell the difference. She knew all the right questions to ask. I didn’t have to correct her stance, except that she was too tense. She may hate the thing, but she knows how to use it.”

John shook his head. “What are you trying to say, Lorne?”

“That maybe the reason she resisted this so long is that she knows all this stuff already and just didn’t want other people to know. You know how she can be about image sometimes.”

“Do you want me to say something to her about it?”

“No, I just. . . thought maybe you’d want to know,” Lorne replied. “It was just weird.”

“I’ll bet,” John said under his breath. Louder, he said, “We’ve got a briefing for your mission tomorrow in ten minutes. I’ll see you there.”

Lorne nodded and left, and John hopped up on Elizabeth’s desk, swinging his feet while he waited for her. She showed up within a few minutes, kissed him lightly on the mouth, and went on gathering up various things from her desk. “You could have put more effort into that,” John said.

“Into what?”

When she walked by him, he grabbed her by the back of her neck and kissed her the right way. “Into that,” he clarified with a smirk.

“John,” she chided.

“I know, I know. None of that in the office,” he replied. “Sometimes you’re no fun.”

“Listen, you find room in the budget for some kind of wall other than glass, and we’ll revisit the issue,” Elizabeth said, a devilish smile on her face. “In the meantime, a little restraint wouldn’t be out of order.”

“Yeah, but my manly impulsiveness is what first attracted you to me.”

“Your ‘manly impulsiveness’ is what first made me want to strangle you,” Elizabeth corrected. “But I doubt even you could come up with a way to roll it into the city’s discretionary spending.” With those final words she ended the argument, as the surest way to get John to give up was to mention specific terms related to budgets and politics. “You coming to the meeting?” she asked.

John nodded once. “You sure you couldn’t send Ellie on this mission?”

“I thought about it,” Elizabeth replied. “But just because I could send her doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do at least some of the work I’m paid to do. Besides, I’d have to change what team would be going along for security.”

“Why?”

“John,” she said, giving him a stern look, “I’m _not_ sending Ellie out with her boyfriend as the head of her security detail. Notice how I’ve almost never taken you out as my security detail?”

“Yeah, but you didn’t even do that before we were involved.”

“We were always involved to some degree.”

There was a certain amount of truth to that, so John didn’t press the issue. He got off her desk instead and asked, “Can I carry your books to class?”

Elizabeth handed over her stack of papers and electronic paraphernalia. “Thanks,” she said with a smile.

* * *

_The White House  
Fourteen years earlier_

Jed Bartlet walked down into the basement of the White House with Leo McGarry, only half listening to what his chief of staff was saying about some plan Josh and Sam had come up with for getting past some Senate confirmation hearing nonsense. After being forced to withdraw his first nominee for attorney general, his staff had gone to incredible lengths to make sure the next guy wouldn’t have some embarrassing or explosive comment on the record in even a college newspaper. It had taken quite a bit longer than Jed had hoped.

But he was only partly listening because he was busy counting the number of steps from the Oval Office to the situation room, and wondering why he had such an irrational dread of the situation room. It was dark and dreary, but such places had never bothered him before. No, it was the feeling that when he was gone, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the CIA director, and anyone else of importance in that room were laughing at him and his ignorance.

_You learn by doing,_ he thought to himself. It had been a couple months, however, and he wasn’t learning fast enough for his taste.

“So what do they need me in the sit room for?” Jed asked, once he found an opening in Leo’s monologue.

“Something’s happened in Peru,” Leo replied softly.

A minute later they’d reached the double doors, and Leo placed his palm on the scanner to unlock it. They walked into the anteroom, where Marines opened another door and one of them said, “Ten hut!”

Everyone inside the dark situation room stood up immediately. “Keep your seats,” Jed said, but no one sat down until he did, at the head of the table. “What’s the situation?”

“Sir,” began the CIA director, George Rollie, “there’s a situation in Peru. A group of American businessmen from Westcor were taken hostage approximately three hours ago, according to our sources in the country.”

“Westcor being. . .”

“Mining. One of the largest mining corporations in the country, but does almost all its mining internationally,” Leo supplied. “These guys were in southern Peru to inspect a silver mine where there had been a larger-than-normal number of fatalities recently.”

Jed wondered for a moment was a normal number of fatalities was, but chose not to ask that. “We’re sure – I mean absolutely sure – that these guys were just inspecting the mine? Not CIA or contractors or anything?”

“We’re sure, sir,” the CIA director replied. “They were taken hostage forty miles north of Caylloma, and their Peruvian escorts were found stoned to death.”

“Stoned?” Jed repeated.

“The favorite execution method of the Communist Party of Peru,” said a representative from the Pentagon. “They’re more commonly known as the Shining Path. They stone their victims to save on bullets.”

“Well, that’s one way to keep costs down,” Jed remarked dryly. “What do we do to get these guys out?”

“The previous administration had a plan in place for such events,” Rollie said. “The UN sends in a team of negotiators, and with those negotiators we send an undercover CIA operative, who can infiltrate the organization and ideally take out the leaders and free the hostages.”

“What kind of cover are we talking about?” Leo asked.

“She’ll be posing as the wife of one of the hostages.”

“And we’d pretend to allow a woman with no practical skills to walk into a hostage situation with a UN diplomat?” Jed asked.

“We would strongly advise against it,” Leo said. “But there’s a whole network on cable devoted to the stupid things American women do, so it’s not wildly unrealistic.”

“Have we got our people picked for this thing?” Jed asked.

“Kate Harper, CIA, Navy,” the director replied. “Lot of experience in situations like this.”

Her picture came up on the screen at the other end of the room, and Jed was surprised by the appearance of the blonde woman. “She looks awfully young,” he commented.

“Yes, sir, that’s part of the appeal. She doesn’t look dangerous.”

“No, I mean she looks awfully young to pose as the wife of one of these men.”

“She’ll be posing as Kathryn Allen, the youngest of the wives,” Rollie explained. “There’s actually a passing resemblance.”

“And who’s leading the UN team?” Jed asked.

Another page came up on the screen, and he froze. “Elizabeth Weir,” said Rollie. “American, but has never worked for the government. Bachelor’s and law degree from Georgetown, doctorate from the Maxwell School of Diplomacy. She’s been working for the UN for about five years now, and she’s starting to be sent on high-profile missions.”

Jed didn’t have to hear any of this. He’d known Elizabeth Weir for most of a decade and knew more than these guys were going to tell him. She was bright and capable, and she was going to cause problems if she found out she was being used by the CIA.

“Have any of you spoken to Doctor Weir?” he asked.

“The UN has agreed to send her, if that’s what you’re asking,” said the CIA director. “They obviously don’t know about the whole plan.”

“No, I meant have any of you ever _met_ Dr. Weir,” Jed corrected.

“Sir,” Leo said, “she’s very conversant in academic discussions of foreign policy, but–”

“Believe me, Leo, she _will_ figure out what’s going on,” he interrupted. “I don’t know what your agent’s going to do, but Dr. Weir will not be a happy camper when she realizes she’s being used by the CIA.”

“If, sir,” Rollie said.

“No, _when_ ,” Jed replied. “Believe me.” He stared down at the table for a few seconds and then got to his feet. Everyone else in the room stood up too. “But she won’t endanger the mission when she does. I’m sending her to you, Rollie, when she comes back pissed beyond belief.

“Send them out.”

As he exited the situation room, he couldn’t help but feel like this was going to get a lot worse before it was going to get better.

* * *

The mission was leaving about an hour before dawn, to get to the homeworld of the Mabirrans in time for an afternoon of talks followed by a feast to celebrate whatever agreements they would come to. It was probably going to be a rather easy mission. The Mabirrans lived near a vast complex of Ancient ruins, and in exchange for the right to explore the site, the Atlantis expedition would be offering the aid of their agricultural experts, who would be able to help the Mabirrans increase their crop sizes without having to clear more of the dense forest that surrounded much of their town.

When Elizabeth had kissed the boys goodbye, she headed to the control room, John following her. “You coming to ask me one more time not to go?” she teased.

“No, just coming along to see you off,” he replied. He reached to her neck to tuck the tag of her shirt back under the fabric. “And apparently to help you get dressed.”

She adjusted her kevlar vest. Though it was just a diplomatic mission, John had insisted that Elizabeth wear it. That was an argument they’d stopped having years ago.

“You’ll keep your eyes open, right?” he asked.

“Yes, John.”

“No wandering off by yourself.”

“That’s how we ended up with Peter, you know.”

“Elizabeth.” She turned to look at him and found him quite serious. “I mean it.”

She nodded, and they stopped short of the control room. She had half a mind to remind him that this was just a peaceful diplomatic mission, but given how frequently “peaceful diplomatic missions” had turned out to be anything but peaceful, she kept that thought to herself. “I’ll be careful,” she promised. “You going to help Ellie keep up with everything here while we’re away?”

“Damn, I forgot.”

“What?”

“Oh, Ellie asked me to get someone from the military to sit in on a meeting she’s got with some of the new guys,” John explained. “I forgot to assign someone to it.”

Elizabeth smiled and kissed him briefly. “Do it yourself,” she said. “Consider it a character-building exercise.”

“Hey, I thought we weren’t doing that at work.”

He was making fun of her, so she grabbed his collar with both hands and kissed him until he groaned and grabbed her by the hips. She pulled away then and breathlessly said, “We’re not.” As she walked away, into the control room, she added, “See you tomorrow, John.”

When she was a safe distance away, she looked over her shoulder and saw him shaking his head.

Lorne and his men were already assembled in the gate room when she arrived. “Am I late?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” Lorne replied. “We’re just here early.”

Elizabeth smiled, and Ellie came up from one of the side entrances. “Doctor Weir,” she said, “are you ready to disembark?”

“Just about. You have everything for the next couple days?”

“I thought you were scheduled to be back in the morning,” Ellie said.

“It never hurts to be over-prepared,” Elizabeth replied. “If all goes well, we’ll be home for breakfast tomorrow, but you never know when things will run long.”

Ellie nodded. “I’ll look over the schedule for tomorrow. I’ve got some free time now.”

“All right. Try to keep John out of trouble, all right?”

“Sure,” she said, laughing a little.

Ellie turned her attention to her boyfriend, and Elizabeth looked up at the control room and waved. A few seconds later, the gate fired up. Ellie stepped away and hurried up the stairs, while Elizabeth said, “All right, gentlemen, let’s get ourselves a treaty.”

* * *

_New York City_

It had been years since Elizabeth had been in this restaurant, an intimate little Moroccan place between Greenwich Village and Chinatown, but she could still remember the smell and taste of spices and wine there. She had a great deal of work to do that evening, but upon getting a call from an old friend, she left the United Nations Headquarters early, intent on going back after dinner.

“Elizabeth Weir,” she said when the maitre d’ asked her name.

“The gentleman is waiting for you,” the man replied. “If you’ll walk this way.”

She followed him into a dark corner of the restaurant, and she smiled when she saw her companion for the evening. “ _Bon soir_ , Élisée,” he said, standing as the maitre d’ left. “It has been too long.”

She kissed his cheek, and was surprised when he kissed her on the mouth too. “Thièrry,” she replied, smiling. “Or should I call you Ambassador Ducret now?”

“You? Never.” They sat down in the booth, where Thièrry already had a bottle of white wine open, and he poured her a glass. “I hope your taste hasn’t changed much since we were last here. I ordered for you already. I imagine you do not have much leisure time tonight.”

“Thank you,” she said, taking the wine he offered. “And you’re right. I haven’t got as much time as I would like.”

“Then I shall cut to the chase and tell you that you look as lovely as you did the day I last left New York, and that I am sorry I have been in the country for so many weeks and have just now contacted you,” he said.

Elizabeth laughed. “There must be better ways to get women, Thièrry,” she said, and he laughed with her. Truthfully, she didn’t think he needed much in the way of method in getting women. He’d smiled at her on her first day of work at the UN and she’d been a lost cause. In the few years since he’d left the UN to work in France again, he’d developed a few light wrinkles around his eyes, and his hair had a touch of grey. He was still strikingly handsome, and it seemed he still had a way of making her melt into goo just by staring at her like she was the only woman who had ever mattered to him.

She sipped her wine, and he replied, “It really has been too long, my dear.”

“It has,” Elizabeth replied as their appetizers arrived. “And I’m impressed, Thièrry. You haven’t forgotten what I like.”

He ran his fingers down her bare arm, but she paused only for a moment, pleased that she could keep her composure even when an ex-boyfriend who was now an ambassador was hitting on her like this. “My apologies,” he said when she didn’t react. “I suppose I should have asked if you are seeing anyone.”

“I’m not,” she said, looking at him. “But you said in your message that you had something to tell me.”

“I do,” Thièrry replied. “I understand you are to go to Peru by week’s end.”

Elizabeth nodded. “Some American businessmen and two Canadians and a Frenchman were kidnapped by _el Sendero Luminoso_ two days ago,” she replied. “I’m taking a team from the UN in to negotiate Red Cross access and, hopefully, their release.”

“Anything else?”

She curled her nose up. “The wife of one of the Americans,” she said. “I don’t know why the State Department’s letting her go, but they are. I’m apparently supposed to baby-sit her.”

“I have a warning for you, Élisée,” he replied, his voice very low and close. “I have reason to believe that someone on this trip is not who he claims to be.”

Elizabeth’s eyes widened. “Thièrry, what makes you say that?”

“I have a source whom I would never doubt,” he said, “and as your old friend, I felt it best to warn you.”

“The president is an old friend too,” she replied, “and he would tell me if–”

“No, Élisée, he would not,” Thièrry interrupted. “Not this time.”

She kept her voice quiet. “Is it CIA?”

“I cannot be certain, but that is my guess.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “I am sorry I cannot give you more information than this, but I ask you to be careful. More careful than you have ever been. The Shining Path is not known for its history of peaceful resolutions. If you discover who the agent is, stay out of his way. Let him do what he comes to do.”

She nodded, feeling suddenly cold. “I will.”

Thièrry nodded too and kissed her, and Elizabeth let him. “Now,” he said, in a louder voice, “you must tell me all about these last few years.”

She did, though not as comfortably as she would have hoped. When she was not forthcoming, he told her stories of his work with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tales of the ridiculous that eventually made her laugh again. When their dessert was served, she said, “Thank you, Thièrry, for. . . for telling me.”

“Do not thank me,” he replied.

“Why?”

“Because I have not tried to talk you out of it, as I should.” He looked at her quite seriously and added, “But I know you too well, Élisée. You would not listen anyway.”

* * *

It was late in the evening on Mabirra when Elizabeth read off the final terms of her expedition’s agreement with the Mabirrans. For full, unfettered access to the nearby ruins, she’d had to give them a little more than she’d hoped, but if Rodney’s excited assessment of the site was to be trusted, it was worth it.

That evening, the leader, a man named Craiscus, raised a toast in honor of Elizabeth and the new alliance. She had learned long ago to drink as little as possible at these events. One never knew exactly how much alcohol was in these local drinks, and she remembered all too well the first time she’d gotten drunk on the Athosians’ most potent brew.

There was one moment that bothered her, however. Craiscus mentioned Tradan, and Elizabeth had stiffened before she could clamp down on her reaction to the mention her son’s planet of origin. The man saw it, though, and it left her unsettled as he talked about how they had come to their allies’ planet one day and found that all the Tradanians had vanished into thin air. It couldn’t have been more than a few days after Peter’s birth and the subsequent arrival of the Wraith.

After the feast was over, they were all led off to separate rooms in the great hall. The Mabirrans were relatively advanced for the Pegasus galaxy, but their living practices reminded Elizabeth of old Earth legends where large groups of people lived under one roof and shared in all things. After a few minutes of solitude, she heard a knock on the door. “Come in,” she said, and in came Marcus Lorne. “Colonel.”

“Ma’am,” he replied.

“Can I help you?”

“Yeah, there was. . .” He looked around the room for a second before starting over. “Craiscus said something tonight.”

“I know,” Elizabeth said. “They were allies of the Tradanians.”

“Do you think they suspect anything?” he asked.

She decided to be honest with him. “It’s possible,” she replied. “It’s been four years, though. By now they may have given up ever finding out what happened to Tradan.”

“Would you?” he asked, and Elizabeth wished he hadn’t. The truth was that it had been seven years since Aiden Ford had first gone missing, and sometimes she still wondered if he was alive somewhere, even though she had never shared John’s optimism on that score.

“Have you ever been able to get past that day?” Lorne asked quietly.

“Colonel,” she said, “it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault the Wraith showed up like that.”

“We both know that isn’t true,” he replied. “I activated that sensor in their temple. If I hadn’t gone in there–”

“Colonel,” she repeated. “You didn’t do anything intentionally to bring the Wraith down on them. You would never do that. Accidents happen. The Wraith were woken up in this galaxy because of an accident.”

“And I doubt Colonel Sheppard’s ever stopped blaming himself for that.”

Elizabeth looked at him with eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you go back to your room and get some sleep?” It wasn’t really a question or a suggestion. “We have a long day ahead of us.”

“Yes, ma’am. Good night.”

He left as unobtrusively as he came, but Elizabeth had to admit that she felt more than a little unsettled by the strange coincidence. In the years since John and Elizabeth had taken Peter in and the Tradanians had vanished, they’d heard nothing from any population about the incident. In a subsequent trip to the planet, they’d determined that a statue in the temple had been embellished with a sensor. It was hard to walk around the galaxy without finding one, but this one, half-hidden by moss, had been difficult to see. Unfortunately, it still functioned, and it activated when Lorne had brushed his fingers over it. The Wraith knew their old nemesis was long gone, but they also knew that their new nemesis could often work Ancient technology as well.

Once the darts had arrived, Elizabeth, Peter, and Lorne’s team had been huddled together in a puddle jumper for hours, hearing the screams outside.

It was an unsettling memory, and the only way she got to sleep was by thinking of her son, and how they had managed to save one that day. That was better than nothing.

* * *

_Near Caylloma, Peru_

The UN team left New York in summer and arrived in Peru in winter. Kate Harper loved the sudden change. She always did better in cold climates. That was ironic, as she’d spent almost her entire career in the general vicinity of the equator.

In the last five years, she’d spent more of her life in danger than out of it, and she was finding it a little scary that sometimes she felt more comfortable as someone else than as Kate Harper. Perhaps that was to blame for a spectacularly failed marriage. She could disappear into character with great alacrity and finesse. It seemed all that time in high school theatre had helped her after all.

The character now was a wealthy California woman with dark, curly hair and a husband kidnapped somewhere in the Peruvian Andes. As Kate she knew that the hostages would probably be dead by the time she got a chance to take out the head of the Shining Path. As Kathryn she had to believe that they would survive.

The UN officials on the trip were not suspicious of her at all. She tended not to speak unless spoken to, and the others seemed to have assumed that she was too involved in her fears and concerns to be very friendly. Her cover was a good one if she wanted to avoid much contact with her travel companions. So far, it was working.

One morning the fog was rolling down the mountains, and Elizabeth Weir came up to her. They would reach the Shining Path’s camp that day, after a day and a half in the wilderness. “Dr. Weir,” Kate said.

“Please, call me Elizabeth,” the woman replied.

“Then call me Kathryn. Or Kate.”

Elizabeth smiled tightly, and Kate could tell that something was on her mind. She said nothing, though, and let Elizabeth do the talking. “You’ve been avoiding the others,” she said. “I understand that this must be terribly difficult for you, but I hope you realize that we’re all very worried about your husband and those with him. We’re doing everything we can.”

Kate was silent for a while, looking down at her boots. “The guide’s terrified,” she said at last.

“The guides for Westcor’s group were all murdered. I would be too.” Elizabeth looked at her. “I won’t pretend to be okay with this. I wish you had stayed behind in New York, or even in Lima.”

“I’ll be fine,” Kate replied. “I really will.”

Elizabeth nodded. “I’m starting to get that impression.”

Kate finally looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“I was expecting a dilettante, to be honest,” Elizabeth replied, her words sounding very deliberate. “I was expecting you to have turned back already. I wasn’t expecting someone who would speak the language fluently and wear appropriate shoes.”

She walked off, and Kate turned her back on the group as they finished getting ready. Something had happened in that conversation, and Kate suddenly knew that the CIA had seriously underestimated Elizabeth Weir. There was something in the woman’s tone of voice that made Kate wonder if the diplomat already suspected her.

This was not going to go well.

* * *

Elizabeth had been a heavy sleeper once upon a time, but something about Atlantis had made her more sensitive in her sleep. She could sleep through thunder and lightning, but would wake up if John got out of bed or if one of the children started making noise in the adjoining room.

When she woke on Mabirra, she didn’t know what had woken her, but she had a feeling that something was wrong.

There was a knock on the door a few minutes later, and Elizabeth rose to get it, opening it slowly. Crascius’ aide was on the other side, looking very worried. “Dr. Weir,” the young man said, “something needs your attention.”

Elizabeth nodded. “Just a moment.” She closed the door again and grabbed her vest. She slipped her knife into her boot and pulled her jacket on to hide the vest. When she opened the door again, the man was looking somewhat impatient. “What’s the situation?” she asked.

“One of your men started having seizures,” he explained. “Your Sergeant Rocca came to us.”

She knew immediately that this wasn’t right. If one of the men was in need of medical attention, Rocca would have come to her first, not to the Mabirrans. She needed to get to Colonel Lorne as quickly as possible.

The aide led her away from the living quarters and into the main hall. Moonlight was flooding in through the open doors, and Elizabeth saw Lorne and his team seated on the floor, armed guards all around them.

At the sight of her, Lorne tried to get up, but a guard kicked him back down to the floor. “Good evening, Doctor,” said a voice behind her, and she turned around.

“Craiscus,” she said, “what are you doing?”

“I have questions for you, Dr. Weir,” he replied. “I believe you know of a planet called Tradan.”

“Yes,” she replied, not hesitating.

“And I believe you know what happened to that planet.”

“The Wraith,” Elizabeth said.

He chuckled softly. “We are not so advanced as you. That much I will admit. But we are not fools.”

“No one ever said you were,” Elizabeth replied while Craiscus walked around her. “But we did not kill your friends. The Wraith took them.”

“Perhaps you’re more foolish than you first seemed,” Craiscus replied. “We know that the Wraith are not the only enemy in this life. We know that humans can be duplicitous as well.”

“Telling me there’s a medical emergency with one of my people?” she remarked dryly. “How did you get Colonel Lorne’s team out of their rooms? Did you tell them I was unconscious or bleeding?”

His voice was low in her ear, but she kept her eyes on Lorne as Craiscus spoke. “One last time. What happened to Tradan?”

“I already told you.”

Then something sharp was jabbed into her back, and searing pain surged through her whole body before everything went black.

* * *

_Near Caylloma, Peru_

Their Peruvian guide was getting anxious, and Elizabeth didn’t blame him. These people were diplomats, not mountain climbers, and they tended to require more frequent breaks than the guide would have liked. When they stopped for lunch, within a few miles of their destination, her colleagues were sitting around and chatting with each other while Kate Allen sat several feet away, eating alone. Elizabeth went to fix that.

They didn’t talk much at first, just eating quietly and staring out at a bunch of llamas grazing in the grass below the hillside. Elizabeth hadn’t yet figured out everything about this woman, but she knew by now that Kate Allen was not her real name, and that her real goal was something other than freeing the hostages. A part of her was furious at being used like this, but the more rational side was remembering what Thièrry had said to her back in New York. As much as she might despise the CIA’s methods, she wasn’t nearly powerful enough to stand up to them. Someday, perhaps.

“It’s a good cover story,” she said, finally. “I don’t think the others are going to suspect you at all.”

Kate didn’t look as though she were surprised, though Elizabeth imagined that she’d had that kind of reaction trained out of her long ago. “You figured it out in a hurry,” Kate replied, her voice very low.

“Are you angry?”

She shook her head, and Elizabeth believed her. “Impressed, mostly.” Kate looked at her curiously. “Did you speak to the French ambassador before we left?”

“He’s an old friend,” Elizabeth replied neutrally.

“Thièrry Ducret has better connections than I do in some parts of the world,” Kate said. “And he was your boyfriend a few years ago.”

“How did–” Elizabeth cut herself off abruptly, knowing she wasn’t going to like any answer she got to that question. “Never mind. Thièrry’s a good man, and he was worried about me.”

Kate was silent for a while, which made Elizabeth shiver. She knew South America was unpredictable, but even now she still clung to the idea that the United Nations was her protection, even though she knew that there were times when the blue helmets of the peacekeepers were not a symbol strong enough to ward off danger.

“Well,” Elizabeth said, “I’m not going to get in your way. Whatever it is you’re here to do. . . I won’t get in your way.”

“Elizabeth,” Kate said at last, “do you know how to handle a gun?”

Elizabeth’s eyes widened. “It – it’s been a few years, but I’ve had some training,” she admitted. “Why?”

“We’re in Peru, Elizabeth.” Apparently, to Kate, that was enough of an answer.

* * *

Marcus was the second one to wake up.

After Dr. Weir had been knocked out, the rest were hit with the same thing, an object not unlike a taser. He woke up feeling achy all over, and he was surprised to see that Lieutenant Ackerman was already sitting up. “Sir,” the lieutenant said as Marcus pushed himself up, “don’t try to move too fast.”

“How long were you out?” Marcus asked, looking around. There was a little light filtering in from a window far above them. The ground and one wall appeared to be dirt, so he suspected they were underground somewhere. Behind Ackerman, Sergeant Zane was moving a little, but Sergeant Rocca and Dr. Weir were still unconscicous.

“I was waking up when they were taking us through the gate.”

“They took us to another planet?” He cursed under his breath. “Sheppard’s going to go insane when he finds out his wife is missing.”

“What about Dr. Bartlet?” Ackerman asked.

Truth be told, Marcus had no idea how Ellie would react.

Beside him, Dr. Weir made a little noise, and Marcus immediately turned to her. “Doctor,” he said.

“Colonel?” she replied, sounding groggy. “What the hell?”

“I’m not sure, ma’am,” he said. “I just woke up a couple minutes ago myself.”

“Help me up.”

Marcus grabbed the hand she held out and let her pull, slipping his other hand under her to support her. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Like I got electrocuted,” she replied. “Which is appropriate, since I think I _was_.”

“Yes, ma’am, we all were,” Ackerman said.

“Lieutenant,” Elizabeth replied, “you seem a bit less out of it than the rest of us.”

“I’ve been awake the longest.”

“Can you give us a breakdown of the situation, then?”

“We’re no longer on Mabirra,” the lieutenant said. “I don’t know what planet we’re on. I haven’t seen anyone since we were dumped in here, but that was just about ten minutes ago.”

“How long until we miss our scheduled contact with Atlantis?”

“Six hours.”

Dr. Weir nodded. “That means we’ve got about that long before they attempt to make radio contact, and then maybe another hour before someone goes to Mabirra. Depends on how long Ellie can keep John in line.”

“She’s never had to before,” Marcus said.

“She can,” Elizabeth replied. “I wouldn’t have picked her for this job if I’d believed otherwise. She can do this.”

Rocca and Zane were sitting up by then and asking the same questions, so Marcus lowered his voice. “Any chance you’re armed?” he asked, remembering their lesson from a few days earlier.

Subtly, she ran her hand down her leg and slipped her fingers into her boot. “They didn’t find the knife,” she said after a moment.

“Good,” he replied. “We may need it.”

* * *

_Near Caylloma, Peru_

The camp of the Shining Path was remote, in a narrow valley and shrouded by thick jungle that was difficult to traverse. Elizabeth had no wish to ever go back to these mountains. It was beautiful, but the terrain was rough, and her goal was grim. It didn’t help that there were only two in the group who really knew what they were doing in the Peruvian jungle, and one of them had to pretend like she didn’t know.

Oddly, Kate seemed to have relaxed since Elizabeth had intimated that she knew that the woman was CIA. She was an odd woman, Elizabeth decided, even though she was fairly certain she’d never know her real name, let alone what she was really like.

They arrived at the camp around sunset, and all was quiet. There were no signs of activity at all, no one walking around, no one talking. Elizabeth looked at Kate, feeling a little sick. Kate’s demeanor hadn’t changed, but she was reaching into the jacket she hadn’t removed since they’d started into the jungle.

“Dr. Weir,” said the translator in the group, Victor Gambelli, “there’s no one here.”

“Something’s wrong,” she replied. “Everyone, split off in twos. Check out the buildings, inside and out. Let’s see if we can find these hostages. But be careful.”

The others did as Elizabeth said, and Kate followed with Elizabeth. “This is pointless,” Kate said.

“I know,” Elizabeth replied, “but we’ve got to do something.”

They crossed to the other end of the camp and began checking buildings, but the only people they saw were the other UN personnel. Elizabeth was starting to think they’d had bad information when Kate pushed a door open and swore loudly. “Elizabeth?”

Elizabeth came over, and in the shadowy hut she saw seven men on the ground. They’d each been shot in the head. She covered her mouth and turned away.

One of the men across the way spotted her and called out, “Dr. Weir, did you–”

An eruption of gunfire cut off whatever he was saying. Twenty feet in front of Elizabeth, four or five bullets ripped through their Peruvian guide’s chest. Before she could even scream, Elizabeth felt herself being yanked inside the building with the bodies. “What’s going–”

Half on top of her, Kate clamped one hand over Elizabeth’s mouth, keeping her pinned to the ground in the corner with her other arm. Elizabeth made the mistake of looking out over the small room. Seeing all the bodies made her feel sick again, and she hastily closed her eyes, hoping the afterimage would wear off quickly.

The shots ceased, and Elizabeth heard people outside talking in Spanish. She caught only a few words here and there. Then the voices got closer, and someone opened the door of the shack. It swung open and nearly slammed into Kate and Elizabeth, but it hit the wall of the shack with a loud thump before it could give them away. They were tucked into a tight triangle formed by two walls and the door, and Elizabeth felt like her heart was beating so hard it was going to just give out. After a few agonizing moments, the person at the door muttered, “ _No están aquí. Solamente los muertos_.” And as suddenly as he’d opened the door, he closed it.

Kate didn’t let her move, though, not until long after the sounds of voices and footsteps had receded. The stench in the building was growing unbearable by the time the CIA agent got off her and helped her to her feet. The first thing she did was walk outside and throw up. Kate didn’t seem surprised by this at all.

There were two dead. Elizabeth had seen the guide fall, but Karl Pierce was dead too. The rest were nowhere to be found. “Kate,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

The other woman walked across the camp and lifted something up from behind a wheelbarrow laid on its side. It was her pack, and from it Kate pulled out a gun. “Here,” she said.

Elizabeth looked down at her dirty and torn clothes helplessly. “What am I supposed to do with that?”

Kate sighed and pulled a holster from the bag too. “I knew there was a reason I carried two of these,” she said. “Take your jacket off.”

Elizabeth did as she was told, and Kate helped her get the shoulder holster in place. It felt so wrong, but it didn’t seem that way to Kate. “All right,” the agent said, “let’s go.”

Kate started off into the jungle, and Elizabeth followed, though she had no idea where they were going. A part of her didn’t want to know, either. She wanted to get back to Lima, but she wanted to help her colleagues too. And she knew that the only way either of those things would happen was through this stranger, who’d probably saved her life.

* * *

The graveyard shift was still on duty in the control room when Ellie was contacted. A technician told her that Marcus and Elizabeth’s group were late. Had it been any other group, she wouldn’t have hurried through breakfast, but as John would be charging into the control room as soon as he heard, she finished eating as quickly as possible.

John came into the control room as she did, looking a bit sweaty. Ronon followed him in, and Ellie wondered if they’d been jogging when John had gotten word. His concern was obvious, so she cut to the chase. “What’s the situation?” she asked of the sergeant.

“Dr. Weir’s group missed its scheduled contact approximately forty-five minutes ago,” the technician replied. “Following procedure, we dialed the planet after half an hour and attempted to make radio contact, but were unsuccessful.”

“Could just mean they’ve wandered out of range,” Ellie suggested.

John shook his head. “The first-contact report on this planet said the Mabirrans stay close to the gate. They don’t have settlements more than a mile away.”

Ellie nodded. “All right. Make the attempt again.” While the sergeant dialed the planet, she looked at John and said, “May we speak, Colonel?”

John followed her into Elizabeth’s office. Ronon stayed out in the control room. “This isn’t like Elizabeth,” John said.

“I know,” Ellie replied. “It’s not like Marcus either. They know better than to wander off. Something’s happened.”

John nodded. “What’s the plan?”

“In about two hours, I need to go to P77-469 and see what’s going on,” she said, looking down at her PDA and pulling up a list of what teams were currently on Atlantis. “Not alone, obviously, in case they met with hostilities. In the meantime, I need you to talk to the team that made first contact and go over the reports–”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” John interrupted, drawing Ellie’s attention to him. “Who do you think’s going with you?”

“Not you,” she replied. “One of us has to stay, and you’re certainly not going.”

“Damn it, Ellie, that’s my wife out there!”

“Which is exactly why you’re staying here,” she countered. “You cause collateral damage even when you’re _not_ personally involved in a situation. You’re staying here, and while I’m gone, you’re talking to the first-contact team and going over mission reports so you can give me military options when I get back.”

The conclusion of her order was enough to stun him. As far as Ellie knew, Elizabeth never asked for military options off the bat. But then, she wasn’t Elizabeth.

John was still clearly unhappy, though, and that was a bit of an obstacle. “Captain Halloway’s team can go with you,” he said, his voice gruff. “But go now.”

“In two hours,” Ellie reiterated.

“Ellie–”

“Colonel,” she said, deliberately emphasizing his title rather than his name, “two hours. You know the protocol. Three hours after the first missed contact.”

He was clearly unhappy about that, but he held back any other reservations. “Take Ronon with you.”

Ellie nodded. “Contact Captain Halloway. Tell him I may need him in the gate room soon.” With that, she headed back to the control room, where she saw that the gate was shutting down. “Anything?” she asked.

The sergeant shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

Ellie looked around and saw Ronon hovering nearby. “Ronon,” she said, “if I have to go off-world, Colonel Sheppard wants you to come with me.”

“He’s not going himself?” he asked.

“No,” Ellie replied simply. “I’m going to Mabirra to find out what happened to Dr. Weir and Colonel Lorne’s team. The last thing I want to do is cause a diplomatic incident. Can you be ready–”

“I’m ready now.”

“Thank you,” she said. “We’ll be leaving in two hours.”

* * *

_Near Caylloma, Peru_

Elizabeth couldn’t get used to the gun snugged against her side. There was no place to rest her arms that didn’t feel terribly awkward. Eventually she gave up trying to shake the discomfort, because there were plenty of other reasons to feel uncomfortable.

Night had fallen, and the mountaintop jungle was getting cold. Kate showed no signs of slowing down as she followed minute signs of where their ambushers had gone, and Elizabeth was glad to have taken time for at least some sporadic exercise over the last few years. Otherwise she never would have kept up with the CIA agent. After a few hours of hiking, however, the sky clouded up, and Kate couldn’t pick out the trail anymore. They sat down against the trunk of a huge tree, and Kate handed Elizabeth a bottle of water. “You need to keep yourself hydrated,” she said.

Elizabeth took it without question and began drinking. The jungle wasn’t entirely silent, and she didn’t figure she would stop jumping at the sounds of birds and insects and whatever else was awake. But nothing startled her so much as when Kate touched her arm. “You’re bleeding,” she said.

Glancing down, Elizabeth saw that Kate was right. There was a hole in her jacket ringed with blood, and she shrugged it off. The cut on her forearm didn’t look very serious. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a first aid kit in your bag,” she remarked. “I have no idea what I cut myself on.”

“That happens sometimes,” Kate replied, reaching into her bag. The blood was dry now, but she cleaned it up with some peroxide anyway and put a bandage over it. “So why would the UN send you to resolve a hostage situation in Peru when your Spanish is worse than my Mandarin?”

Elizabeth looked at her in disbelief. “I don’t know much about you,” she said, “but you’re a smart woman and that’s a dumb question.”

To her surprise, Kate smiled. “I have my theories.”

“I’m a Soviet specialist,” Elizabeth replied. “Or was. Then when I’d just started law school, the Berlin Wall came down and I wasn’t useful to anyone anymore. That happened to a lot of my friends from college, actually. But it turns out we’re useful in places like this. Places where the U. S. and the Soviet Union were screwing around with dictators and communists, trying to prove which of them was more powerful.”

“I wouldn’t characterize it as screwing around.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.” Elizabeth sighed. “There are few things in the world more dangerous than superpowers. I’m honestly not sure how we justified meddling the way we did.”

“It’s not easy,” Kate replied. “But in the long run I think we were right. The last thing we wanted was a huge Soviet presence on this side of the world.”

“There’s something disingenuous about our methods, though,” said Elizabeth. “The Soviets were at least propping up fellow communists. We’d support anyone who didn’t lean to the left. Salvador Allende was a socialist, but he was _nothing_ compared to Pinochet. How in the world does the CIA justify having backed that coup? No one in his right mind would call Pinochet a fledgling democrat. We gambled on the violent and corrupt instead of letting these countries sort themselves out.”

“Elizabeth,” Kate said quietly, “can I say something?”

“Sure.”

“It’s the middle of the night and we were almost killed a couple hours ago,” she said. “Can we lay off the philosophical and sociopolitical ramblings for a while?”

Elizabeth gave her an embarrassed smile. “Sorry.”

“Try to get a couple hours of sleep, okay?” Kate replied. “We’ll see if we can pick up the trail again when the clouds clear out.”

She didn’t need much convincing. “When are you going to sleep?”

“You need it,” Kate said. “I can live without.”

So Elizabeth slept. Not easily at first, but she slept eventually, her body’s long-held habit of deep sleep giving her a few hours’ rest. When she woke, it didn’t seem like Kate had moved. The CIA agent turned to look at Elizabeth. “Let’s go,” she said, and they headed farther up the mountainside.

* * *

John spent two hours talking with Major Cranton’s team about the Mabirrans, their society and technology and geography, anything that might help him figure out the best way to get Elizabeth and the others out if it was to come to that. During the third hour, when Ellie was off-world with Ronon and Halloway’s team, he spent his time reading reports and studying pictures. After that, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he began pacing in Elizabeth’s office.

The gate fired up down below, and he hurried into the control room, where the new shift had taken over a couple hours earlier. “Sir, it’s Dr. Bartlet’s IDC,” one of the technicians called as John ran through to the stairs.

He was halfway down when people walked through, and the gate shut down when he reached the floor. Ellie, a vest over her red shirt and her blonde curls pulled back, was followed by Captain Halloway’s team. “Ellie,” John said, his voice dangerously low, “where are Elizabeth and the others?”

She looked at him darkly. “Colonel, if you’ll come with me,” she said, walking around him.

“Ellie,” he pressed, grabbing her arm and whirling her around.

“ _Colonel_ ,” she repeated, each word very deliberate, “if you’ll come with me.”

It was the first time John had ever seen that flash of anger in her eyes, so he followed silently. Apparently he wasn’t the only one to notice the sudden change in Ellie Bartlet’s demeanor. As they walked from the gate room to Elizabeth’s office, people stopped what they were doing and stared, or got out of her way entirely.

Walking in after her, John was painfully aware that he couldn’t throw a fit in a glass room. Ellie rubbed her hands up and down her face. “I don’t think they’re on Mabirra anymore,” she said without preamble.

“What?”

“When Elizabeth goes off-world, she carries a transponder with her,” Ellie explained. “You know that. But hers operates on a very low frequency, around the frequency that’s given off by the average lightning strike, so you have to have a VLF detector to pick up the signal.”

“Right, right,” John said, feeling impatient. “I was there when those things were designed. It was my idea to have them operate well below normal frequencies so the Wraith wouldn’t think the emissions were man-made.”

“Halloway said we were getting pings on the VLF, but not at the frequency the emergency transponders operate at,” Ellie replied. “I think the Mabirrans may be more advanced than we thought.”

“You mean, like the Genii?”

She shrugged. “It makes sense. This is a galaxy where survival is still the first priority. Why not try to make scientific advances and hide them as long as possible?”

John looked down at the floor. “There’s a strike plan on the desk.”

“Not yet,” she said, her thumbnail between her teeth.

“Ellie,” he said, “what did they tell you?”

“That Elizabeth and Marcus and the others never arrived,” Ellie replied. “It’s possible, but something’s just not right about it.”

John took a deep breath. “Okay, what are the odds that that’s actually true?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” she said. “There’s some pretty thick forest in the area. But that means that Dr. Weir’s transponder isn’t functioning for some reason. I guess they could have gotten attacked by an animal or something, but we walked from the gate to the main settlement. There weren’t any signs of a struggle along that route, so they would have had to have wandered off. That doesn’t sound like Colonel Lorne or Dr. Weir. The path’s pretty easy to follow.”

While Ellie babbled, John’s throat started to constrict. Over the course of eight years, this kind of thing had happened too many times, and he wasn’t sure he could put up with much more. But when Ellie stopped talking, John looked up at her and suddenly understood that above all else, she was scared. He remembered the all-consuming fear he’d felt the first time he’d been threatened with Elizabeth’s death, and he knew he had to be the strong one, at least until Ellie found her footing.

“I’ll send a team out in a cloaked jumper to do a wide sweep around the gate. See if we can find anything,” he said. “Our next step is probably Teyla. She can go in posing as a trader and see if she can pick up any tips about it.”

Ellie nodded, looking relieved. “Thank you, Colonel,” she said, turning back to the desk. He headed out, but stopped when Ellie said, “John?”

He turned around and saw her with the strike plan in her hand. “Yeah?”

“I know you usually make a recommendation to Elizabeth and she approves it if it isn’t too outlandish,” she said, “but I’d like more than one military option.”

John nodded and left. He needed to see his boys and find a way to tell them that they weren’t going to see their mother for a while.

There really was only so much more of this he could take.


	2. Chapter 2

_The White House_

Jed got the wake-up call in the middle of the night. He was a little glad that Abbey was out of the country, because she would have been pretty irritated when his chief of staff, the CIA director, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs showed up in the Residence.

After pulling his robe on, he opened the door to see the three men waiting outside. “This is a fun group,” he said, standing aside to let them in.

“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” Leo said. “There was a development in Peru that the director thought you needed to hear about now instead of waiting for the morning security briefing.”

“Well, let’s hear it,” Jed replied, sitting down in one of the room’s armchairs.

The other three men followed suit. “Sir,” Director Rollie said, “our agent with the UN team missed her scheduled contact six hours ago.”

“Six hours ago?” Jed repeated. “Why am I just now finding out?”

“There are a lot of reasons why she could have missed the contact,” the director replied. “We wanted to make sure something was wrong before bringing it to your attention.”

“Has this agent ever missed a contact?”

“No, sir,” Admiral Fitzwallace replied. “Though admittedly, she hasn’t been in the field that long.”

“So what are the possibilities?” Jed asked, stifling back a yawn. It coudn’t have been more than two in the morning.

“There’s any number of things that could have happened,” Fitzwallace said. “Could be as simple as her radio being broken, or as serious as the group having been kidnapped or killed. The most likely in my opinion is that they’ve had some contact with the Shining Path, and she’s decided to maintain radio silence in order to avoid detection.”

“Director Rollie, do you agree?”

“The admiral knows this agent rather well, so I’d be inclined to agree with him,” Rollie replied. “Besides, we have some sources on the ground telling us that there’s some kind of movement going on near Caylloma.”

“You’re going to have to come up with something better than that,” Jed replied, getting up. The others stood with him. “And I certainly hope you have something more for me in a couple hours when I come down to the office.”

“Yes, sir,” Rollie said, nodding as he left.

The other two lingered behind. “You know the agent?” Jed asked of Fitzwallace.

“Lieutenant Harper? Yes, sir,” the admiral replied. “She was my aide straight out of the Academy. And I understand from Leo that one of the UN diplomats worked on your campaign.”

“Dr. Weir,” Jed said. “She did some low-key advising on foreign policy matters, but I’ve known her a lot longer than that. Probably about as long as you’ve known Lieutenant Harper.”

“I wish I’d been here, sir,” Fitzwallace replied. “This basic plan has been on the books for far too long. When the director informed me in Manila of the situation, I strongly advised him not to recommend it to you.”

“How much trouble is it going to cause if I ask you to take over this operation, Fitz?”

“Well, Director Rollie won’t like it, but as the agent is a Navy officer, I do have some claim to jurisdiction,” said the admiral.

“Good.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Fitzwallace left, and as the door closed Leo said, “Sir, this is more than just a woman you brought into the campaign going missing in South America.”

“Elizabeth’s a good friend,” Jed replied. “She has been for a while. I met her when she was just a lobbyist, before she got to work for the UN. And in the years I’ve known her, she’s never once asked me for a political favor.”

“Ethics in a lobbyist,” Leo remarked. “I never thought I’d live to see the day. But you should get some sleep, sir. Looks like we’ve got a long day coming.”

Leo left, and Jed went back to bed. But sleep didn’t come easily, as images of his friend and the horrors of the Amazon refused to stay buried for long.

* * *

Almost two days passed before the prisoners saw anyone but each other.

As the hours passed, the men traded war stories. They’d all been in this kind of situation before, it seemed. Elizabeth had too, more than once, but usually the cavalry had arrived within a day. Not to mention, this was the first time it had happened since her children had been born. She didn’t even want to think about what John was going through.

Light was seeping in through a tiny window high above them when Lorne came over to her side, his jacket in his hand. “You look cold,” he said.

Under other circumstances she might have refused, as she generally liked the cold, but she was grateful enough for his consideration that she took the jacket and draped it over her legs. “Thank you,” she said.

“No problem,” he replied. Then, in a lower voice, he said, “It’s been two days. Are they just going to starve us to death?”

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “Something’s not adding up here.”

No sooner had she said that than a loud clanging echoed through the cell, startling Elizabeth so badly that she jumped. There were footsteps, and Lorne got to his feet, standing between Elizabeth and the cell door. The others on his team got up too. “Dr. Weir,” said a deep, booming voice.

She got to her feet slowly, holding Lorne’s jacket over her arm. “Why are we being held?” she demanded.

“For questioning,” the intruder replied.

“Without food or water?”

“That will be rectified shortly,” he said. “If you would come with me, Doctor.”

“No,” Lorne said, before Elizabeth could even open her mouth. “Talk to me first.”

“Colonel,” she said, sternly. He looked over his shoulder, and she had to bite her tongue. She wasn’t sure what Lorne was doing, but he was clearly determined to do it.

“Doctor?” said their captor, drawing her attention away.

After a moment of hesitation and another glance at Lorne, Elizabeth nodded. “Take him,” she said, quietly.

It was unnecessary, but the man grabbed Lorne and handed him off to two guards standing behind. As Lorne was taken away, a fourth person came in with a canteen and a bag. “Make this last, Doctor,” the first man said. “It may be some time before you see anyone else again.”

Elizabeth waited until their captors had left before she opened the bag, half-expecting to find an alien snake inside. But there was only some kind of bread. It wasn’t fresh, but it wasn’t rock-hard either. There was more than she had anticipated, too, and she handed the bread out to her hungry men.

As she passed the canteen around, Ackerman said, “Ma’am, permission to speak freely?”

Elizabeth nodded. “Permission granted, Lieutenant.”

“Why’d you let the colonel go?”

She was grateful that he didn’t phrase it the way it was in her head – _why’d you let them take him?_ – but it was still a hard question to answer. They were all going to get a turn at this unless they were rescued soon, so she wasn’t quite sure why Lorne had seemed so insistent. But he _had_ insisted, and therein lay her answer.

She thought of so many times when she’d had to give orders she didn’t want to give, or let people go when she knew death was the most probable outcome. There were still nights when John would be off-world and her dreams would be haunted by letting him go on a suicide mission eight years earlier. She’d come so close to losing so much, but it had been the right decision in the end.

“Sometimes the hardest thing to do as a commander is to trust your men,” she finally replied. “But it’s crucial. Your men have to know that you’ll entrust them with the critical task, and that when they come to you, you’ll trust their ideas. Lorne had his reasons, and I trust him.”

“Besides,” said Sergeant Zane, “it’s not like any of us are getting out of it.”

Unnerved by what she would not voice, Elizabeth got to her feet and stood at the cell door with her fist at her mouth. “John will find us.”

“Ma’am,” Sergeant Rocca said, “that’s not going to be easy.”

“John will find us,” she repeated. She had to believe it, even if her men wouldn’t.

Several hours later, they dragged Lorne back with a bloody nose and an assortment of other injuries. In the dim light, Elizabeth’s stomach turned over at the sight of all the blood and bruises. She didn’t want to think about what it looked like under better lighting conditions, and a selfish part of her mind was pointing out that it could have been her.

“Marcus,” she said, rolling up his jacket and placing it under his head. “Marcus, say something.”

He opened one eye – the one that wasn’t swelling up – and replied, “You’ve never called me that before.”

“You’ve never scared me like that before,” she said. “Lieutenant, the water.”

The canteen was passed over, and Elizabeth pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, wetted it slightly, and started cleaning the blood off Lorne’s face. “I didn’t tell them anything you hadn’t already said,” he offered.

“I’d like to think they wouldn’t beat someone this badly for cooperating.”

“This was nothing.”

Elizabeth licked her lips, pushing back the images that provoked. Unfortunately she’d been with John long enough that she knew how bad it could be.

“Colonel,” she said softly, even though the others could have heard her whisper, “why did you do this?”

“You’re not trained to take this,” he replied immediately. “Besides, if Colonel Sheppard is going to rescue us soon, I figured the woman with two children ought to be spared this kind of beating.”

Elizabeth had to swallow hard to accept that kind of loyalty, but she kept her reservations to herself, and instead began to fear the sound of footsteps outside.

The next time, they came for her.

She could hear John’s voice in her head, telling her to note the route they took (fifty eight steps, up a staircase, left, seventy-nine steps), to keep her eyes open for doors and windows, anything that might lead to the outside (three doors, no windows), to keep track of security (four guards, all armed). When she saw a rather portly man standing guard at the room she was led to, she had to suppress the urge to smile at the joke she imagined John would make.

The room, unlike the rest of the building that she’d seen, was lit with harsh light not unlike that of fluorescent bulbs. Elizabeth had to squint before her eyes adjusted to the brightness of the room. Inside, she saw a chair and two men, one who had led her there and another who had first come to visit them a few days earlier.

“Ah, Doctor,” said the man who seemed to be leading this capture and interrogation venture. “So good of you to join me.”

He nodded to the man who’d brought her, who left them alone. “And what do I call you?” she asked as the door closed.

“Magister.”

“Your civilization is more advanced than you led us to believe,” she said.

He shrugged. “Other races have done so,” he replied. “It seems to be a benefit to us if we attempt to better ourselves technologically. Every man, woman, and child on Mabirra learns the sciences. Those left behind when the Wraith strike must be able to carry on.”

“And you don’t worry about the Wraith detecting your underground activity?” she asked. “I have heard of some civilizations who–”

“We are not so foolish as the Genii,” the Magister interrupted. “Perhaps we’ve been luckier than they were, but we have learned from what we know of their mistakes.”

Elizabeth wished she had a Geiger counter.

“Will you sit?” he asked.

“I prefer to stand.”

“I thought you might.” He took the chair instead. Elizabeth’s eyes seemed to have finally adjusted, and she took in her surroundings, noting the door on the other side of the room. At this point she was positioned such that if she tried to make a run for it, the Magister would be able to catch her. And then there was the matter of the armed guard outside.

“Why are you holding us?” Elizabeth demanded.

“You, we believe, were involved in the disappearance of the population of Tradan,” he replied. “You knew this before you asked.”

She swallowed. “You’ve yet to show any proof.”

“The proof is in your face, Doctor,” the Magister said. “You blanche when the planet is mentioned. A guilty conscience? Did you give that order? Were you there yourself?”

Elizabeth closed her eyes. There were a good many things she did not want this man to know, so she started with the smallest thing. “We were there,” she said softly. “My people had managed to hide in a small craft with stealth capabilities as the attack began.”

“And you didn’t try to help them.”

“We did,” Elizabeth argued. “There wasn’t much we could do.”

“Then what _did_ you do, Doctor?” the Magister asked.

“There was a baby,” she said, reluctantly. “He was born just moments before the Wraith arrived. We got a couple minutes’ warning from my team, and his father begged me to take the baby with me to safety.”

The Magister was silent for a long while, before pulling an object from his coat. Elizabeth didn’t recognize it, but it had two prongs on it. She suspected it was the same thing that had been used on her and her team back on Mabirra, and she tried not to shudder. The man got to his feet and started to circle her. Elizabeth stood her ground. “So you tell me now that a Tradanian survived,” he said. “Where is this child?”

As he passed, Elizabeth looked him in the eye. “I kept my promise to his father,” she said. “He’s my child now, just as much as the son I gave birth to.”

“The Tradanians had a proverb,” the Magister said. “That when a child was born in a stranger’s presence–”

“He would never come to harm,” Elizabeth finished. “I know. That’s why I was present at his birth.”

“There was another proverb,” he replied. “That one’s brother is he whom one cares for when all hope is gone.”

“What are you saying?” Elizabeth asked, feeling cold.

“That this child is the responsibility of Tradan’s brothers, not a stranger,” the Magister said. “He should be on Mabirra.”

She stood up a little straighter. “You might as well kill me now,” she said, “because you are _not_ taking my son.”

The Magister stood behind her and laughed. “I’m not going to kill you over this child, Doctor,” he told her. “First, I need to determine your complicity in the downfall of our allies. Then, I will kill you.”

He jabbed the prod into her back and she screamed, blinding pain surging through her before she collapsed into darkness.

* * *

_Near Caylloma, Peru_

Elizabeth woke up just as the clouds were clearing, and in the hour or two before sunrise, Kate pulled her back to the trail. She could tell that Elizabeth was uncomfortable, but to the diplomat’s credit, she didn’t complain. Kate was glad of that.

As they walked together, Kate thought a few times about explaining to Elizabeth everything that was going on, including the fact that she was there to assassinate a man named Brizuela, not to rescue the hostages. That part of the mission she’d settled into second priority. Those lives were valuable, but if push came to shove and her options were to save a handful of lives now or save hundreds of lives in the long term, she’d opt for the latter. There was only so much she could do.

The sun was rising when Elizabeth finally spoke, and Kate had to wonder if the other woman was reading her thoughts. “Can we continue the sociopolitical ramblings now?” she asked.

Kate tried not to laugh. “Sure.”

“What’s wrong with letting a country work out its own problems?”

“What’s wrong with letting a three-year-old pick out his own diet?”

“Well, I don’t believe the two are comparable,” said Elizabeth. “We’re talking about adults capable of reasoning.”

“And that’s where it gets sticky.” Kate sighed. “The natural argument is that we’re talking about people who are largely uneducated and easily swayed. At that point, either I’m a neo-imperialist at best or xenophobic at worst.”

“They _are_ largely uneducated and easily swayed,” Elizabeth conceded. “But all civilization rises first from a group of uneducated people. Uneducated doesn’t mean less capable of making intelligent decisions.”

“So your question is a bad way of going about the subject.”

“No, our opinions just aren’t ever going to coincide,” she said. “I think that when we talk about self-determination of nations, we should mean it for all nations, not just white Europeans.”

“Wait a minute–”

“And your opinion isn’t the opposite of that,” Elizabeth continued calmly. “You think that any nation with a history of brutal dictatorship needs protection from itself. It’s like the abortion debate. Pro-life and pro-choice aren’t exactly two sides of the same coin, but people in both camps like to talk like it is because it oversimplifies an enormously complicated issue.”

Kate shouldn’t have been surprised by the ease with which Elizabeth articulated this, but she was. “So what’s your solution?” she asked.

“That we’re both right,” Elizabeth replied. “That yes, a nation with a history of following brutal and corrupt dictators needs to be protected from itself, but also that those people have the right to determine their own government in the end.”

“What’s your problem with the CIA, then?”

“I don’t like secrecy,” she said, quite simply. “I don’t like that we can’t seem to do this openly and without violence. My father always said that you can do more good by offering help openly than by threatening privately.”

Kate paused. “There’s something else.”

“You guys keep screwing up.”

Elizabeth said this with such a deadpan tone that Kate barely held in her laughter. Unfortunately, there was a lot of truth to Elizabeth’s assertion.

For her part, Elizabeth seemed not to notice. “The poorer the people, the more unstable the government,” she continued. “When you help people raise themselves up from poverty, you cease to allow a country to harbor drug traffickers or terrorists or the kind of corruption we see in Latin America now. And you do it while acknowledging that the country has its own body of laws that may not coincide with your own and while respecting that country’s autonomy, and not inciting its citizens to hate America and everything we touch.”

“I can’t really argue with that logic,” Kate replied, after a long pause.

“The next time I’m on _Capital Beat_ to talk about globalization and American intervention, I want you on opposite me,” Elizabeth said. “That’s the fastest I’ve ever gotten anyone to say that.”

Kate smiled. “The CIA’s kind of fussy about undercover agents going on television.”

Elizabeth sighed. “I knew there was a catch somewhere.”

* * *

Three days after her first interrogation, Elizabeth was taken back to the Magister. She was taken via a different route to the same room, which gave her a perspective on how large this place was. She wondered to herself if the point of this was to show her how vast the building was, or if it was simply that the guards didn’t understand the danger in showing her more of it.

When she arrived in the white room, she began to suspect it was the latter. The Magister opened another door and led her up a flight of stairs that brought them to a rooftop garden. Elizabeth made a show of inhaling the fresh air deeply and enjoying the sunlight, but she was careful to note everything she could. There were six other people on the roof, all of them guards. The building was nestled into the foot of a mountain range, and around them was a forest. In the distance, where the elevation was rising again, she thought she saw the curve of the Stargate rising above the trees.

“Will you walk with me?” the Magister said.

Elizabeth said nothing, but fell in step with him.

“I’ve been considering our last conversation,” he said, “and my conversations with your men. They are exceptionally loyal.”

“It’s a useful trait,” she replied neutrally.

“To you, perhaps,” said the Magister. “To them, it is proving most dangerous.”

“I’ve seen what you’ve done to my men,” Elizabeth said, working to keep her voice calm despite her anger. “Among my people that would never be tolerated.”

“Then your people are not very realistic,” he replied. They stopped walking near a bubbling fountain, which was several feet deep. “How long have you been in this galaxy, Doctor? I can tell you were not born here, or you were born on a planet untouched by the Wraith.”

Elizabeth hesitated. “By my planet’s reckoning, it’s been eight years since I left my homeworld with my men.”

“And by your planet’s reckoning, is eight years a long time?”

“It can be,” she replied.

“Careful there, Doctor,” he said. “A day can be a long time if you’re being held captive. A minute can be a long time, if I hold your head under the water here.”

Elizabeth stiffened slightly. “Do you enjoy this?” she asked, and wished the words unsaid a moment later.

“You and your people are of interest to me,” said the Magister, with a smile that made her very uncomfortable. “You’re of a curious race. From our conversation before I can tell that you have a great capacity to love, and your men love you as well. Yet you’re also capable of great cruelty.”

She knew he was talking about Tradan, accusing her yet again of a crime she didn’t commit. But she couldn’t bring herself to deny what he’d said. Over the course of seven years she had changed considerably. Some of those changes were good ones, personal and professional, but there were some she regretted. She hated that she could give an unpleasant order without feeling sick about it. She hated that she could let her husband go off into danger. She hated that she could violate the Geneva Convention and justify it to herself and others.

And sometimes, she hated that she no longer had nightmares, even of a night in Peru.

The Magister took her silence as assent. “You won’t deny it?”

“We’re human,” Elizabeth replied. “We’re all capable of horrible things.”

“But you are a leader, Doctor,” he said, his voice almost sing-song. “Should you not rise above such petty concerns of mere mortals?”

He was mocking her now, and Elizabeth made little attempt to cover her disgust. “You don’t believe that any more than I do,” she countered. “Being a leader makes you accountable for more, but that doesn’t make you less likely to make mistakes.”

“So is that what Tradan is to you?” he asked, his tone now cold. “A simple mistake?”

“No,” Elizabeth replied. “Tradan was – and still is – a tragedy. But it was no more my fault than yours.”

“Ah, yes, you were there to rescue the lone survivor and raise him as your own,” the Magister said. “Do you make a habit of that? Is such a child a trophy among your people, or just a quirk of your clan?”

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes, trying very hard not to say anything that might jeopardize her safety now. “What is it about these people?” she asked.

“They were our brothers,” the Magister replied. “Many years ago our people had grown too large for our farming land to sustain, and a small group set out to Tradan. For a long time they considered themselves a colony of Mabirra, but after the last great culling, they became their own people. After that, we were always friends and allies.”

“You have long memories,” Elizabeth observed.

“Yes,” said the Magister, “we do.”

She waited a long moment before speaking again. “So when does the torture start today?”

“What makes you ask that?”

Elizabeth raised a brow. “You didn’t bring me up here for the view.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Then why am I here?”

“What did you do to Tradan?” he asked, his voice now quite cold.

Staring up at him defiantly, she replied, “I’ve already told you.”

The Magister backhanded her across her jaw, making contact with a crack. She lost her balance, falling backward into the frigid water of the fountain and flailing to get back up again. But there was a current pulling her down, and in her terror she let her foot get caught on something. It seemed an eternity before strong arms pulled her free, and she blacked out with John’s name on her lips.

She awoke back in the cell as someone moved her head. “Elizabeth?” said someone above her.

Elizabeth blinked a few times and saw Lorne hovering over her. She tried to smile. “You’ve never called me that before,” she said.

“I hate to resort to cliché,” the colonel replied, “but you’ve really never scared any of us like that before. What happened?”

She licked her lips and found they were cold. Someone had removed her jacket, too, as it was probably drenched. “They took me to the top of the building,” she said. “There’s a garden up there with a fountain. I don’t think the Magister meant to push me in, but I don’t think he was in much of a hurry to help me.”

Lorne made a disgusted sound, and Ackerman said something particularly crude in response. “What does this guy want from us?” the lieutenant asked.

“That’s a good question,” Elizabeth replied. “I think he’d tell you he’s looking for justice, but he’s out for revenge.”

She sat up, and Lorne wrapped his jacket around her, not letting her protest. “We don’t have a way of getting you dry,” he said. “All we can do is try to keep you as warm as possible.”

“Ellie’s rubbed off on you,” she remarked, as he took her hand in his and began rubbing up and down her arm, trying to warm her skin.

“She’d say it’s about time,” he replied. “Do you still think Sheppard’s going to find us?”

Elizabeth nodded. “He always does.”

“I’m worried about Ellie,” he quietly admitted, after a moment’s pause.

“She has John with her,” she replied. “They’ll make it through and find us.”

But as their captivity dragged on, Elizabeth found herself voicing this belief less and less, though she still meant it whenever she said it. Days turned into weeks, and each of them got new bruises and cuts, proof of their captor’s cruelty. And Lorne, who had stood up for her so bravely that first time, was still paying the price for it.

On the morning Lorne started coughing up blood, Elizabeth finally asked aloud, “What the hell is taking John so long?”

It was fortunate, then, that they had already started planning an escape.

* * *

_Near Caylloma, Peru_

“You seem awfully calm,” Kate remarked as they crested a peak, a few hours after dawn.

And it was true. Elizabeth was feeling a lot calmer about things than she probably had any right to. “I think I’m in some stage of nervous breakdown,” she replied. “Denial or something.”

“That’s trauma, not nervous breakdown.”

“I suspect the two kind of go hand in hand.” Elizabeth sighed. “Losing my calm won’t help matters any.”

“Very true,” Kate replied absently. Then she pointed to her right. “That way.”

Elizabeth followed behind as she had since the previous evening. “So,” Kate said, “you knew I wasn’t what I said I was because of my shoes?”

“That was part of it,” Elizabeth replied. “The demeanor just didn’t work for me either. But I knew to look for someone, so that’s probably why you stuck out.”

Kate shook her head. “I had a feeling a few days ago that my cover was going to be blown,” she said. “The CIA seriously underestimated you.”

“That’s ironic,” said Elizabeth. “The CIA tried to _hire_ me when I was a senior in college.”

“Fluent in Russian?”

“Can pass for native,” she said. “Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and. . .”

“You weren’t useful anymore.” Kate shook her head. “The State Department and the CIA have both done some dumb things about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not like the Soviets were all magically gone,” Kate said. “Do you know how many nuclear warheads are lying around the former Soviet states with little supervision because the infrastructure collapsed? Besides, the communists still run large parts of the country. Just because the Politburo disbanded doesn’t mean those people aren’t still influential to some degree.”

“I know,” Elizabeth replied. “I just wasn’t sure you did.”

“I know a lot of things.”

They continued on in silence for a while, and Elizabeth brought her hand up to her shoulder, rubbing at tense muscles. Her neck had been sore for hours. Very close by, a bird swooped between trees very close to them and screeched so loudly that Elizabeth jumped. “It’s a carrion eater,” Kate said. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Carrion?” Elizabeth repeated, her eyes wide. “That doesn’t sound good.”

Kate looked at her and frowned for just a moment before seeming to realize what Elizabeth was trying to say. She veered off to the right, following the bird. Elizabeth followed hesitantly, figuring that this wasn’t the direction Kate had originally intended.

The smell hit Elizabeth first, the rancid stench of decay, and her throat started to constrict. Smelling this once in twenty-four hours was more than enough. It wasn’t long before she saw the birds descending on the body of Jan Sirenko, a Ukrainian from her team. He’d been stoned.

She rushed toward him without thinking, but Kate grabbed her arm, whirling her around, and she held her in place, facing away from the body. “You can’t do anything to help him, Elizabeth,” she said. “We’ve got to keep going.”

“This isn’t a rescue mission, is it?” Elizabeth asked, not sure why the thought had come into her head.

Kate hesitated. “No. I will if I can, but. . . no.”

Tears in her eyes, Elizabeth fought the urge to look back at Jan’s corpse. This was the fate that awaited the rest of her team. The lucky ones had died in the gunfire hours before. Even though much of what Kate had said to any of them had been false, Elizabeth believed her this time, that if she could, she would rescue the hostages. But she also believed that Kate was prepared to sacrifice them if she couldn’t accomplish her primary goal.

For the first time since all of this had started, Elizabeth thought about turning back. She knew Kate had a radio, and Elizabeth could call someone to get her out while Kate went on her way. She didn’t want to stand in the jungle anymore with a gun strapped to her body and the smell of rotting flesh in her nostrils. She wanted to go home and cry herself to sleep. But there was Jan, and there were others still alive, she hoped, and she felt an obligation to them.

“Elizabeth, I’m going to break radio silence in a couple minutes,” Kate said, her arm still around Elizabeth. “There’s a team stationed in Caylloma to extract us. It was part of the plan. I can get them in here to get you out, but I think your colleagues have more of a chance of getting out too if you come with me. Then the team can get here and extract all of us at once.”

Slowly, Elizabeth nodded, knowing that Kate was sacrificing a lot in making that offer, but knowing she couldn’t take it. “You’re right. I should stay with you.”

Kate released her, and Elizabeth started back toward the path they’d been on, careful where she turned so she didn’t look at the body again. Kate was just a step behind.

* * *

Ellie spent much of the next few days pacing in Elizabeth’s office, whether there were people with her or not.

She’d sent out a cloaked jumper a few hours after returning from Mabirra, as John had suggested. He’d also offered to fly the mission himself, but given his lack of protest when she told him no, he didn’t seem to have expected her to let him. The search yielded nothing except more evidence to support Ellie’s two suspicions: first, that the Mabirrans were more advanced than they let on, and second, that the team was no longer there. Sending scientists to take apart the DHD and examine the crystal for the latest addresses dialed probably wouldn’t be the best of ideas, as their best guesses could only tell them that the Mabirrans were probably hostile, and that they had no idea how advanced those potential hostiles were.

By the fourth day, they’d heard nothing, and Ellie made a second trip to the planet, this time with an even larger armed escort. Surrounded by Marines and their guns, she felt so small. The meeting proved fruitless, except that it reinforced her instinct that the leader of the Mabirrans was lying about something. From John she kept hearing about a will to act. If something didn’t change soon, she was going to end up with problems from him as well.

The next morning was their scheduled contact with Atlantis, and she stood in Elizabeth’s office with the door closed for the first time that she could remember. “Atlantis, this is Admiral Harper,” said the commander of the SGC over a radio on Elizabeth’s desk.

“Admiral, this is Dr. Bartlet,” Ellie replied.

“Hello, Ellie,” Kate said. It wasn’t entirely uncommon for Ellie to handle contact with Earth, so there was no reason for the admiral to be suspicious. “What news do you have?”

“Not good news, I’m afraid,” Ellie said. “Dr. Weir and the team that was accompanying her went missing five days ago.”

There was a moment of silence. “And you didn’t contact me before now?”

“I’ve been to the planet in question twice since they disappeared,” she replied. “I’ve followed standard procedure in this.”

“Ellie, the leader of the expedition is missing,” Kate said, disbelief in her voice. “That doesn’t warrant standard procedure.”

“It’s my boyfriend’s team that’s with her, Kate,” Ellie said quietly. “I _had_ to follow standard procedure.”

“I’m sorry,” Kate replied. “What kind of leads do you have?”

“Not many,” said Ellie. “I’m sending Teyla this afternoon to see if she can find anything. She’s rather good at infiltration.”

“So I’ve heard.” There was another pregnant pause, and Kate asked, “Ellie, how’s Colonel Sheppard taking this?”

“About as well as you’d expect,” Ellie admitted. “He’s getting pretty withdrawn. Spending all his off-duty time with the boys. I don’t blame him.”

“Ellie,” Kate replied, “I meant what’s he advising you to do.”

“He wants me to do something,” Ellie said. “I asked for military options the first day. His retaliation plans are pretty severe. But at this point we don’t have any solid proof that the Mabirrans are lying to us and they’re holding our people hostage. It’s just a gut feeling.”

“He’s not wrong,” said Kate. “If they really are holding Dr. Weir and the others, you can’t let the kidnapping of diplomats go unpunished. The precedent that sets is far too dangerous.”

“I know,” Ellie replied. “But I can’t attack people on the information I have.”

“No, you can’t.”

There was a long silence, and Ellie found herself thinking about her father, and how many horrible decisions like this he’d had to make over the course of his presidency. She remembered thinking on occasion that he was too prone to use the military as the arm of justice around the world, but now she found herself understanding a little of how he’d gotten there.

“Kate,” she said, “what would my father have done?”

“What do you think he’d do?”

She thought about it for a minute. “He’d sit still for now and make everyone else sit still too,” she said. “And pray.”

“Sounds about right.” Kate cleared her throat. “The _Daedalus_ should be there in a few days. I imagine that will be helpful to the search and rescue efforts.”

Ellie nodded. “I imagine it will.”

“And Ellie?” Kate said. “If there are any major developments between now and the next scheduled contact, contact me immediately. I know what procedure says and I know why you were concerned about overriding that, but this is Dr. Weir. I need to be informed so I can keep President Santos in the loop.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ellie replied. “Atlantis out.”

With a nod at a technician in the control room, the gate was shut down and Ellie left the office, heading for John and Elizabeth’s quarters. When she got there and knocked on the door, it was Peter who opened it. “Hi, Ellie,” he said before getting back to playing with cars on the floor. Josiah ran up and hugged her leg, and then rejoined his brother.

“Is your dad here?” she asked. Siah pointed at the door to the bathroom, which opened momentarily. “Colonel,” she said.

He looked at her in surprise. “Anything?”

Ellie shook her head minutely. “I just talked with Admiral Harper.”

“Oh yeah?”

She glanced down at the boys, and John seemed to understand her hesitation. “Come on,” he said, leading her to the door to the boys’ bedroom. “What is it?”

Ellie folded her arms across herself. “She agrees with you to a point,” she explained. “She says that if this turns out to be a kidnapping, we have to act.”

“But?”

She bit her lower lip. “I can’t do this on a guess, John,” she said. “I don’t want to jeopardize innocent lives and be wrong.”

“You’re not wrong,” John pressed.

“But I need proof,” Ellie replied, shaking her head. “Something to tell me that the Mabirrans are lying to us. I’m sending Teyla in an hour.”

“Good,” he said. Then he looked down for a moment. “You look exhausted.”

“I’m not sleeping well,” she confessed.

He touched her arm awkwardly, and much to her surprise. “Go see Beckett,” he said. “He can give you something to help that. You need to be clear-headed.”

Ellie looked up at him, biting her lip again. “You?”

“I’ll be okay.” Then John pulled his hand away, as though not knowing what he needed to do. “Do you need me to come in now?” he asked.

She shook her head, taking a step back toward the door. “No,” she replied. “Spend the time with your children. They need you too.”

* * *

_The White House_

Jed spent most of his morning frustrated beyond belief with everything that was going on around him. After the wake-up call and the bad news from Rollie, he’d been wary, expecting everything else around him to go wrong. His staff was on edge, and on more than one occasion he’d nearly yelled at a couple of them. It had not been a pleasant morning. He kept waiting to hear the worst.

His midday meeting with the senior staff was interrupted quite suddenly by the appearance of Margaret at the door to Leo’s office. “Excuse me, President Bartlet,” she said, walking up to Leo and adding something in a whisper.

“Right,” Leo replied. “All right, everybody, let’s get back to work.”

The staffers exchanged glances with each other as they exited. Jed knew there would wild speculation going on in the outer office once the door was closed behind them, but he focused his attention on Leo. “What is it?” he asked.

“We’re needed in the situation room.”

To the basement they headed, and in the sit room, the usual suspects were already gathered. “Keep your seats,” he ordered when they all stood up, but none of them sat until he’d taken his place at the head of the table. “What’ve you got?”

“Mr. President,” said Admiral Fitzwallace, at his right, “we’ve received a communication from Lieutenant Harper.”

“They’re still alive?” Jed asked.

“From several of the key code phrases she’s used, we’ve ascertained that most of the delegation is being held hostage,” said Director Rollie. “There was an ambush. We believe there are some casualties, and we also think that she has Dr. Weir with her.”

It was the first good news Jed had heard all day, and he sat back in his chair, feeling some small amount of relief. “I’m hearing a lot of uncertainty.”

“Well, it’s not as though she could come out and say all this,” the director said.

Though Jed detected some amount of patronizing in the CIA director’s voice, he looked at Fitzwallace. “How sure are we?” he asked instead.

“We’re as sure as we can be in this kind of situation,” Fitzwallace replied. “Our sources in this part of the world aren’t the best.”

“Which explains why I sent Dr. Weir and her delegation into an ambush.”

“Sir, we acted on what intelligence we had,” Rollie said. “We knew the basics–”

“A fact which you failed to inform me of when you recommended this mission.”

“Sir, the hostages–”

“Are probably dead, or will be soon, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. I’m not convinced you ever wanted to do anything about it,” Jed interrupted, getting to his feet. Everyone else followed suit. “Fitz, what are my options?”

“We’ve got a CIA team waiting in Caylloma,” Fitzwallace replied. “We’ve triangulated the origin of Lieutenant Harper’s transmission, and we can have the team over the area within ninety minutes. They can extract Harper and any survivors at that time.”

Jed hated the rather clinical way in which Fitz had explained it, but decided that that was probably for the best. He glared at the CIA director one last time, wondering if it would be worth it to raise suspicions by firing the man. “Go,” he said, and the room sprang into action.

Leo followed him out of the room. “You were quiet back there,” he commented.

“You had it under control,” Leo replied. “Figured I wouldn’t mess with a good thing.”

“I hate that room,” Jed said, almost to himself. “I hate the decisions it represents.”

“You knew that was part of the job when you took it.”

“Yeah, but when I took it, I was thinking more about the fun stuff.”

“The fun stuff?”

“You know, fixing education. Social Security. Medicare. Right to privacy.”

Leo looked at him oddly. “You’ve got a screwy definition of ‘fun stuff’, you know that, sir?”

“Yeah, I do.”

* * *

It was late in the evening when Teyla returned from her mission to Mabirra, and she wasn’t smiling. Ellie and John were both in Elizabeth’s office when the Athosian returned, and they hurried into the gate room to meet her. “Teyla,” John said, “tell me something good.”

Teyla looked between them and settled her gaze on Ellie. “Dr. Bartlet,” she said, “I believe this might be of interest to you.”

She opened her fist to reveal a simple key chain, and Ellie’s eyes widened. It was nothing much, just a thick plastic tab over a picture of Curious George, but it was obviously an object from Earth. Moreover, Ellie recognized it immediately. It belonged to Marcus.

“I believe this is a ‘bread crumb’,” Teyla continued. After a rash of teams going missing for one reason or another, Elizabeth had ordered that everyone going off-world carry some object from Earth as a kind of marker, to be dropped, like Hansel leaving bread crumbs in the forest, as a trail for search and rescue efforts. Each was unique, but not something sentimental.

Ellie took it from Teyla’s open palm and turned it over. “It is,” she said. For the first time since all of this began, a quiet anger was building in her. “Where did you find it?”

“I was taken to the great hall of the Mabirrans. I saw this in a corner and took it when no one was looking,” Teyla explained. “But there is something else.”

“What?” John asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

“I mentioned the possibility of trading with them for belkan grain,” she said. “They told me they hadn’t seen that grain since one of their allies vanished. They were friends of the Tradanians.”

“Peter’s home planet?” John said. “Tradan?”

Teyla nodded. “I am afraid so.”

Ellie turned around and headed up the stairs, somehow sure that John and Teyla were following her. “We know the Mabirrans were lying now,” she said as they walked through the control room. “Colonel Lorne was there, at the very least. We know now they have a motive for harming our people. And we know it’s likely that our people are no longer on the planet.”

“But why did they not also take you when you were off-world?” Teyla asked as they entered the office once more.

“The first time they wouldn’t want to rouse even more suspicion,” John answered. “The second time Ellie was heavily guarded.”

“What do we do from here?” Teyla was shaking her head slightly as she asked.

Ellie walked behind Elizabeth’s desk and looked at them. John seemed surprised by the move. “We attempt to contact them via radio,” she said. “The first contact team left them one, and besides, we have pretty good reason to believe that they have radio technology anyway. We tell them we know they’re lying and give them one last chance to tell us the truth.”

“And if they do not?”

Ellie looked at John. “We strike. We can’t allow this kind of offense to go unpunished.”

John nodded, a hardness setting in on his features. “Teyla, tell them to dial P77-469,” he said. As Teyla walked away, he came over to the desk and pulled a radio from a drawer. “Which plan are we going with?”

“The first one you gave me,” Ellie replied. “The air strikes.”

“Do you want me to get ready with my men?”

She shook her head. “It’s bad enough that one of us has to make this decision. You don’t need to pull the trigger.”

He tapped his earpiece. “Major Clark, this is Colonel Sheppard. Report to the control room,” he said.

Teyla came back into the office then as the gate down below established a wormhole. “They are ready,” she said.

Ellie flipped a switch on the radio. “Mabirran control, this is Dr. Bartlet of Atlantis,” she said. “Please respond.”

After a few seconds of light static, a male voice answered, “Dr. Bartlet, to what do we owe the honor?” She recognized the voice as that of the Mabirran leader.

“You are holding five of my people hostage,” she said. “I have proof that they were there, in contact with your leadership, before they failed to contact us. You have a motive, namely that you suspect our involvement in the disappearance of the population of Tradan four years ago.” The last part was mostly conjecture, but if she’d learned anything from a lifetime around politicians, it was to say things with confidence in the hope that others would fall for it. “I’m giving you one last opportunity to retract the blatant lies you’ve told to my face and return my people to me, before I rain down calamity on you and your people.”

Through the glass walls she saw that Major Clark had arrived in the control room. Over the radio, the Mabirran said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Bartlet. My people cannot concede this.”

Ellie let out a long, steady breath to calm herself down as much as possible, not wanting to know what had caused his hesitation. She supposed that at this point, whether he was just sticking to his guns or assuming she wouldn’t go through with it didn’t matter. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said. “Atlantis out.”

Clark came into the office as the gate shut down. “Ma’am,” he said, nodding to Ellie. He’d heard the whole conversation from within the control room. “Colonel?”

“Gather your squadron in the jumper bay,” John ordered. He picked up the file from Elizabeth’s desk and handed it to the major. “This is your mission plan.”

The man took the file and snapped to attention. “Yes, sir,” he said, saluting.

John saluted in return and dismissed him. A few moments later, Teyla excused herself as well. With them gone, Ellie sank into the chair behind her. “You did well,” John said.

“I want to throw up,” she replied.

“Like I said, you did well.”

* * *

_Near Caylloma, Peru_

They reached another camp an hour after finding Jan Sirenko’s body.

This one seemed more permanent, or as permanent as one could expect when dealing with a group of terrorists and drug lords. Though Elizabeth had little doubt that their operations were high enough in revenue that they could afford cushier surroundings, there was a certain advantage to being in this jungle. There probably weren’t that many people in the world who could have tracked through the Amazon to find this place.

Night was falling as they circled around the camp, looking for a way to infiltrate one of the buildings. All of the structures here were larger than the previous camp, leading Elizabeth to think that the Shining Path probably ran a great deal of its drug trafficking through this place. As Kate had instructed her earlier, she had the gun in her hand.

“Won’t that make me more of a target?” she’d protested. “Isn’t it better to at least have the appearance of a peaceful mission?”

“Elizabeth,” Kate had said, looking at her like she’d lost her mind, “this isn’t the UN. They don’t need a Security Council resolution to kill you.”

After that, Elizabeth had decided to stop arguing the point.

The insects all around were almost deafening, masking the sounds of their footsteps as they entered the clearing. Unfortunately it would also make it more difficult for them to hear someone else, but it was a risk they had to take. They moved slowly, quietly, reaching the door after a few heart-stopping near-misses. The door creaked as Kate opened it, but Elizabeth could just hope that it had sounded like one of the bugs that was screeching in the night.

They stepped into a hallway with a linoleum floor and a sickly incandescent bulb, almost burned out, hanging from wires down the way. Elizabeth had started thinking a few days earlier that she’d never get used to wearing hiking boots, even if she started wearing them all the time, and now they made her feet feel even heavier than before. They certainly didn’t seem to lend themselves to stealth, but she followed Kate’s lead anyway.

Kate paused at a door that was partly open, looking inside. Elizabeth suddenly heard footsteps coming down the hall and smacked Kate’s arm. She’d heard it too, and grabbed Elizabeth’s arm to drag her inside and under a table.

The stench was awful, and Elizabeth held her free hand over her nose. She wondered for a moment if they’d just come upon yet another corpse, but bizarrely, it smelled more like seafood gone bad. They were at least a hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, so that didn’t make much sense.

After a few moments, the footsteps passed the door, and Kate crawled out from under the table. “What is that _smell_?” Elizabeth asked, following her.

Kate sniffed the air. “Smells like fish.” Then she looked around a little and said, “Someone gutted a giant squid in here.”

Elizabeth looked at the table they’d been under and saw a pile of guck on top. “Why in the world do you know what that is?”

Kate shrugged. “There was an incident about six months ago where some Peruvian drug dealers tried to smuggle cocaine into the U. S. inside a frozen giant squid.”

“You have a really odd knowledge base.”

“I read a lot.” And they headed back into the hallway.

* * *

After ordering the air strike, Ellie had to run to the bathroom and throw up.

She’d had the stomach flu when she was eight, after her sister Liz caught it from a boyfriend who didn’t last long. She’d spent most of the night in the bathroom kneeling in front of the toilet, and her father had spent hours sitting with her, and she was pretty certain that he’d carried her back to bed. Her mother had been performing an emergency operation at the hospital that night, so it had fallen to her father to try to distract her from the waves of nausea and to hold her hair back. Now, she’d never wanted to be with her father so much since coming to Atlantis.

There were other reasons, too. He’d explain to her that she’d done the right thing, that she’d weighed her options appropriately and that she had made her decision with as little partiality as anyone could. And he’d give her a hug, which was what she most wanted now.

Coming back into Elizabeth’s office, she found John still standing there, hands on his hips as he paced. Ellie sat down on the couch, her arms tight to her stomach as she leaned forward. “You going to be sick?” John asked.

“I just was.”

There was a long silence in which John paced back and forth, but then he came over to the sofa and sat down at the other end. “The waiting’s the worst part,” he said.

“What?”

“When you give an order like this,” he clarified. “The waiting’s the worst part.”

That much she was beginning to understand all too well.

An hour later, Major Clark returned with the news that the strike had been successful. Ellie had to cover her mouth with her hand while Clark reported to her and John. The Mabirrans were indeed more advanced than they had first claimed, but not so advanced that they could defend themselves against this. John’s plan was to strike the Mabirrans’ great hall, from which all their government was conducted. They had also hit a water wheel not far away, as Ellie suspected it had something to do with power generation.

Clark had also done more sweeps of the area, both before and after the strike, but there was still no evidence that Marcus and Elizabeth and the others were there.

When Clark left, Ellie was reeling, and John put his hand on her back. “You all right?” he asked.

Biting the inside of her cheek, she shrugged a little. “I’ll be fine.”

“Hey.”

She looked up at him, and before she could say anything, he was hugging her. It was a little awkward at first, but eventually Ellie hugged him back, grateful that he’d let the shield over his own vulnerabilities down long enough for them both to catch their breath. It was just about all they had time for.

Within the hour, she ordered McKay and a Marine team to Mabirra to retrieve data from the planet’s DHD. Back in Atlantis, evening had fallen by the time the lengthy process had finished and McKay returned. They immediately began cross-referencing the addresses with their database, looking for potential enemies in the list, and in the morning, Ellie sent the first teams out to search for Elizabeth and the missing Marines.

Three weeks later, there was still nothing.

Somewhere along the way she started working out of Elizabeth’s office all the time out of convenience. John had looked at her oddly when he realized what she was doing, but he seemed to understand. When he would stop by in the evenings, he never questioned her about it.

He brought her coffee one evening. “You looked tired,” he said, without a greeting as he entered the office.

“I am a little,” Ellie admitted, taking the cup from him. “What brings you here tonight?”

“Lund’s team struck out on P48-9X9,” John explained. “Well, the people there seem interested in trading, but they’ve never seen Elizabeth. Said they’d keep an eye out for her, though.”

“I know. She stopped by here to explain before heading to the armory,” she said. “How are the boys? I haven’t seen them much lately.”

“They’re worried,” he said simply, fidgeting a bit before sitting down in one of the chairs in front of the desk. “You know, I’d never let Elizabeth do this. Never let her admit defeat.”

“Are you?” Ellie asked, alarmed.

“No,” he said. “Just. . . admitting the possibility.” He cleared his throat and leaned forward. “Look, Ellie, you know if. . . the worst happens, I’m not staying here.”

“What do you mean?” Suddenly she had visions of John heading off through the wilderness, seeking revenge for his wife’s death.

“Elizabeth and I have a hard enough time managing our family and our jobs at the same time,” he explained. “I can’t do that alone, and my kids will come first.”

Ellie nodded. “I understand.”

“Good.”

As he sat back, Ellie looked up to see that Laura and Kate were coming over the catwalk, talking to each other. John turned around when he heard them, and they slowed. “Sorry,” Kate said, “are we interrupting?”

“We were just finished,” John replied, getting up. “Ladies.”

He left, squeezing past Laura and Kate to pass through to the control room. “Hi, Ellie,” Laura said. “Kate wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“This trip was your idea,” Kate protested.

“We agreed to, okay?”

“Girls,” Ellie said, silencing them. As much as she loved her friends, she wasn’t really feeling up to their usual antics, not after what John had said. She’d known John a long time, and the idea of him admitting that defeat was the most likely scenario was unsettling, to say the least.

Then she noticed that Laura was holding a white plastic bag. “Laura, what have you got?”

“Care package,” Laura replied, “since you seem to be sleeping here.”

“I’ll have you know, I’ve slept in a bed every night for the last month,” she countered. “What’d you bring?”

Laura set the bag down on the desk, and Kate said, “Ice cream and pudding cups.”

“And cookies,” Laura added.

Ellie could smell them. “Macadamia nut?”

“Yep. And chocolate chip. Mom knows you like those too,” said Kate. She pulled out a clear plastic bag with the cookies inside, the pudding cups, a pint of ice cream, and a spoon. “Cookies and cream.”

Ellie smiled, almost wistfully. It was actually Marcus’ favorite flavor – hers didn’t show up with the _Daedalus_ very often unless someone brought it for her. She took it anyway and tried to really smile for her friends. “Thanks, you two,” she said.

“There’s a movie tonight,” Laura said. “ _Night of the Lepus_.”

Ellie shook her head. Laura had been put in charge of movie night a very long time ago, for reasons no one could quite remember, and once a month she scheduled a movie that no one in his right mind would want to see unless it were to mock the movie. And mock they did. This wasn’t going to be a good night for it, though. “I’ve got a lot of work to get finished, and not a lot of time to do it in,” she said.

“Oh, come on,” Laura said as Ellie pulled the lid off the ice cream. “It’ll be fun!”

“Laura, let’s leave her alone,” Kate said. “She’s had a rough couple weeks.”

“Which is why she should come to movie night.”

“Which is why she’s entitled to some peace and quiet if she wants.”

“Oh, fine,” Laura said. “If you change your mind, Ellie, I’ll have a seat saved for you.”

“I’ll catch up with you, Laura,” Kate said, as the redhead began to leave.

“Okay.”

With Laura gone, Kate turned her full attention back to Ellie. “I keep expecting you to talk to me,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Kate,” Ellie said. “I hate that I’ve been ignoring you and Laura like this–”

“Ellie,” Kate interrupted, “I meant as Dr. Heightmeyer, not as your friend.”

“Oh.” In truth, she hadn’t really thought about it.

Kate sighed. “I usually let people come to me,” she said, “but I’m worried about you. As a psychologist and as your friend. It’s been almost a month since they went missing, Ellie. That’s a long time to have that kind of stress. I just want you to remember that you can come talk to me, as a professional as well as a friend.”

Despite a pang of guilt, Ellie asked, “Kate, how often does Dr. Weir talk to you?”

Kate gave her a slight smile. “Never. I do this to her about once every six months.”

“Well, I appreciate the thought,” Ellie replied. “When this is all over, you and Laura and I are getting very, very drunk.”

“Sounds therapeutic enough for me.”

Ellie opened her mouth to say something, but at that moment, the gate activated. She got to her feet and rushed down to the gate room as a team walked through. It was Captain Doyle’s team. “Captain,” she said, “anything?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied in his distinctive drawl. “We picked up Dr. Weir’s transponder frequency.”

“Oh, thank God,” Ellie said, and then she smiled. “Head to the conference room for debriefing. Colonel Sheppard and I will join you.”


	3. Chapter 3

_Near Caylloma, Peru_

Elizabeth was pretty sure this whole plan had been a bad idea. In fact, she’d been sure of it for a long time, but she wasn’t about to say that out loud.

The building was larger than she’d expected, perhaps feeling that way because she wasn’t used to stealth. She and Kate moved slowly, trying not to make noise and staying out of sight of the few people who seemed to be awake in the building. Finally, they came to the end of a hallway, and Kate leaned against a door to listen to what was going on behind it. She frowned and pulled a pin from her hair. While Elizabeth stood by nervously, Kate fiddled with the lock and opened the door. In the small, dark room was the rest of Elizabeth’s team. “Dr. Weir!” someone exclaimed, just before Kate could get the door shut.

“Shhh!” Kate hissed. “Do you want to get all of us killed?”

Suddenly there were footsteps and voices shouting in the hallway, and Elizabeth’s heart sank. Despite what Kate had told her outside the camp, she put her gun back in its holster, hoping that they might not find it on her. A few second later, the door burst open, and people were yelling in Spanish. “ _¿Qué vienen aquí?_ ” one of them said.

Elizabeth was too terrified to even try translating that. Instead, she yelped as one of the men grabbed her roughly by the arm and she and Kate were dragged out into the hall.

They were taken to another room on the other end of the building. This one was thick with cigar smoke, reminding Elizabeth vaguely of her father’s poker nights. Kate and Elizabeth were both tossed down unceremoniously, and the man inside the room came over and took Kate’s gun away from her. “ _Trabajo para las Naciones Unidas_ ,” Elizabeth tried to say.

“I know who you are, Dr. Weir,” said the man, sounding irritated in his thickly accented English. “You are of no concern to me. This one,” he continued, looking at Kate, “is of great concern. Do you know what she is?”

Elizabeth curled up, making herself as small as possible. The man kicked at Kate and brandished the gun in her face. “Surely the CIA didn’t send someone in just to rescue some hostages,” he said. “You’ve come here for me. You’ve found me! Here am I – Brizuela.”

Elizabeth cringed. She’d heard that name whispered too many times in the halls of the UN, but it had never struck fear into her as it should have, as it did now.

They were never going to get out of this alive.

* * *

After nearly a month of confinement, Elizabeth and three of the Marines were starting to get weak. Lorne, on the other hand, was deteriorating much faster. While it seemed that Elizabeth was getting the easiest of the interrogations, Marcus was by far getting the worst. It was probably because he’d stood up for her that first time, and for that alone Elizabeth would have felt awful. Now, she was horrified whenever they brought him back. She did her best to take care of him, but there was only so much she could do. He needed real medical attention.

It was after they brought him back with bruises all over his torso that Ackerman came to her and said, softly, “Ma’am, I don’t think the colonel’s going to make it much longer in here.”

“I know,” Elizabeth said. “What do you need me to do?”

Ackerman hesitated. “The colonel said you have a knife.”

Elizabeth froze for a moment. “They’ve never found it on me,” she admitted.

“May I have it, ma’am?”

She pulled the knife and sheath from her boot and handed it over, rolling her foot around a little. After so many days of it being against her ankle, it felt incredibly strange not to have it there. At the same time, a small part of her was glad to hand it over. Whatever happened, she didn’t want to go home to her children with blood on her hands.

Before long, a guard came to the cell and opened it to bring them food. Ackerman got up to take it. Zane and Rocca weren’t far behind, but Elizabeth stayed with Lorne, her face turned away as she heard the sound of the guard being stabbed. He fell to the floor with a thud, and Ackerman was examining the body for some reason while the sergeants came over to help Lorne up to his feet.

“He’s dead,” Ackerman pronounced, retrieving two guns from the guard’s body. One he kept for himself, and then other he started to hold out to Rocca, but Elizabeth grasped the barrel.

“I’ll take it,” she said. “It won’t do them any good, and I can’t help Colonel Lorne.”

“Whatever you say, ma’am,” the lieutenant replied, releasing it. He sounded more than a little surprised.

With that, they headed out.

* * *

_Near Caylloma, Peru_

Kate watched as Elizabeth crawled toward the wall and wanted to scream at her to run away. She should have called the CIA team to extract Elizabeth the day before. She never should have kept Elizabeth with her, dragging her deeper into this horrible, horrible situation.

Brizuela seemed content to ignore Elizabeth for now, however, and Kate was somewhat relieved about that. Elizabeth didn’t belong in this mess. It wasn’t her fight.

“What is your name?” Brizuela asked.

“Kate Allen,” she replied immediately.

“Your _real_ name.” When she didn’t answer, he kicked her in the stomach and she doubled over. “Your CIA has informants; so do I. Now, I know you are not the wife of a man I had killed yesterday. And I know you have come here to kill me.”

“You murder innocent people,” Kate shot back.

“And those people I had killed,” said Brizuela. “They were Westcor. Do you know how many people are sick because of them? How many children have died at Yanacocha because of their gold mine?”

“That doesn’t give you the right–”

“No, it gives me a responsibility.”

“You’re not doing this for justice,” Kate said, trying to keep her voice even. “You’re not even out for revenge. You’re doing this because it’s what you’ve always done. Places like Yanacocha are just an excuse to keep on with the same brutal tactics-”

“Enough!” he screamed, kicking her back. Her head hit the wall hard. “Enough! You cannot lecture me on how to treat the world, you filthy, filthy American.”

He was waving her gun around, and that was scaring her more than anything else. As he was standing over her feet, she couldn’t even get her legs up to kick the gun away. He started yelling at her in Spanish, but then he abruptly stopped. She started reaching for the other gun she had tucked in the back of her pants, but she was never going to grab it in time.

As she watched in horror, he took careful aim, and she winced as a shot was fired.

* * *

M97-X42 was a moon that had long ago been marked in the Atlantis database as a haven for black marketeers and other unsavory aspects of the galaxy. Not many people lived there permanently, but it was John’s understanding that those who did live there lived outside any sense of law, harboring criminals and turning a blind eye if the money was right. He was kicking himself now for not recognizing the moon’s designation as soon as he’d seen it. If someone had just noticed it, they would have realized that it was a prime hiding place for kidnappers and their captives. They could have ended this three weeks earlier.

As his strike force assembled and he gave them their orders, he tried not to remember what Elizabeth had always said about the survival rates in hostage situations.

“All right, everybody, listen up!” he said as everyone was gathering in the gate room. “Captain Doyle’s team managed to triangulate the source of Dr. Weir’s emergency transponder. From what we ascertained with the UAV flyover, she and the team are probably inside a large building that appears to be a warehouse, a considerable distance away from the moon’s major settlements. The sun’s going to come up on the moon in a few hours, so we have to act fast.

“Each team has a VLF detector, right?”

He got nods and assorted affirmatives, and around the group he saw several men adjusting white earpieces, connected to the detector boxes inside their jackets. John had one too. “This is a standard strike and rescue,” he continued. Then a lieutenant not far from him pulled out his stunner, and John had to pause. Somewhere along the way he’d forgotten about that detail, and while he knew what he wanted to do, he also knew what Elizabeth would want him to do. “So that means non-lethal force when at all possible,” he added.

He looked up and saw Ellie standing at the control room balcony, waiting for him. He nodded, and she turned to the control room. A moment later, the gate began to activate. When Ellie turned back to the gate room, she nodded, and John said, “Move out!”

They stepped into a pitch-black night.

Doyle’s team, knowing more or less where the warehouse was, led the way through a grove of very tall trees on hilly terrain. John was focused mostly on not tripping or sliding down the loose, rocky soil. But before long they came to the building, built into the side of a larger hill. John thought he spotted a power line extending from it in another direction. He pulled a life signs detector from his pocket and hit a button to zoom out on the display. There was more movement in that direction than he’d anticipated, including a small cluster of people moving somewhat slowly. And there also appeared to be people in pursuit.

Captain Doyle and Lieutenant Meacham had noticed it too, and he gestured to them to take their teams to a second entrance around the side of the building. He took his team and Major Riga’s to the near door, in hopes that they could herd this group into a defensible – and escapable – position.

Inside the building it was as dark as the night outside, making John wonder what the point of the electric line was. A few steps inside he slipped on a step and nearly tumbled all the way down to the bottom of the staircase. “Uh, careful there,” he said, trying to recover some dignity. “There’s stairs.”

The pinging in his earpiece from the VLF detector was getting louder and more obnoxious as they moved deeper into the building, watching two groups on the life signs detector. Doyle and Meacham led their men in shortly after John’s adventure with the stairs, and the smaller group that he’d spotted to begin with was still heading haphazardly through the building, never backtracking, but not always making great progress. But as they started getting close to an exit, a fourth group was moving into position to intercept them.

They came to a corridor soon, and John gestured to his men to follow him to the right. His eyes had finally adjusted to the darkness, and as he jogged along, he could see the doors along the corridor, at regular intervals. Suddenly a door fifty feet ahead flew open, flooding the juncture of two corridors with light. A group of strangely-dressed men were storming in, and from the other direction, five people were stumbling into the light. John recognized his tall, slim wife in the group immediately, but he stopped in horror as she and one of the men with her raised weapons and fired.

He was functioning entirely on autopilot as he raised his stunner and started firing it at the assailants. Elizabeth had just shot someone.

Elizabeth had just _shot someone_.

It was over in a matter of seconds, as Doyle and Meacham’s group arrived from the other side and took down the last of the enemy. John gestured to Riga to check on the two men who had been shot, and slowly, he walked up to Elizabeth and Lorne’s team.

Lorne was being supported by Rocca and Zane, while Ackerman had run up to help Riga. Elizabeth was staring at the gun in her hand, the look on her face inscrutable. A few feet away, John said, “Elizabeth?”

As the rest of the men began to surround the hostages, watching for reinforcements, she looked up at him and suddenly dropped the alien gun and threw herself at him. He had to take a step back as she clung to him, despite his gear. She was shaking, and he wrapped his arms around her, rubbing her back. He turned slightly and looked at Riga, who had just finished examining the second body. After John’s inquisitive glance, the major shook his head.

He tightened his arms around Elizabeth as much as he could, knowing that if he let her go, he’d be far too tempted to run through the complex, find every last person who’d pushed her to the point where she’d kill someone, and kill them all for having inflicted that on his wife. But he had a responsibility to the others who’d been taken hostage with her, and he had to get her home to their boys.

“Lorne,” he said, looking over at the colonel, “you hanging in there?”

“Yes, sir,” Lorne replied. “Can we go home now?”

Elizabeth finally pried herself off him, and John touched her face, realizing that the answer he was thinking of probably wasn’t the answer to the question Lorne was asking. “Yeah,” he replied anyway. “Yeah, let’s go home.”

* * *

_Near Caylloma, Peru_

Elizabeth was shaking all over as she watched Brizuela kicking and screaming at Kate, wondering where this rage was coming from and suspecting that he used the drugs he exported. She remembered stories of his brutality and knew without a doubt that the stories were far more generous to him than he deserved. She was terrified, and she was about to watch Kate die. Without a doubt, Brizuela would turn on Elizabeth next.

Except. . . she had a gun.

The thought set her heart racing faster, even as her hand slowly moved into her jacket, fingers wrapping around the cold metal. This was a road she didn’t want to go down. A road she couldn’t go down.

She could get out now while Brizuela was distracted, find the rest of her team again, and get out in time for the CIA rescue team to get them. Kate could fend for herself; it wasn’t as though she didn’t have the training for it.

But Kate had also saved her life the day before. To leave her now seemed just as impossible as staying.

Then Brizuela got quiet suddenly, and Elizabeth didn’t dare breathe. He was going to shoot Kate. He was going to kill her unless she did something.

Ignoring the bile rising in her throat, she pulled the gun from its holster, aimed, and fired. She hit his neck, and blood went everywhere, dousing Elizabeth’s face and stinging in her eyes. Brizuela staggered and collapsed onto Kate, dead before he hit the floor, and Elizabeth had to try hard not to throw up. When she finally took a breath again, Kate was still alive.

Kate pushed the body off and got to her feet. Elizabeth dropped the gun and stared at Brizuela’s body in horror. She had killed someone. She had killed a horrible person and had done it to save someone else, but she had killed someone. She had stuck with Kate, knowing that this was an assassination mission, and in the end, she, a diplomat, had been the one to pull the trigger. As she tried to wipe the blood from her face, the world was still shattering around her.

“Elizabeth,” Kate said, “are you okay?”

It took her a long time to respond. After Kate had picked up both the guns, all Elizabeth could do was shake her head. Kate looked horrified.

Elizabeth’s eyes were watering up, and Kate squatted and touched her arm. Elizabeth jumped at her touch, and Kate looked away. “I’m so sorry, Elizabeth,” she said. “I’m so sorry you had to do that for me.”

Elizabeth had to bite her lip to keep from crying, and Kate tilted her head toward the door. “Someone’s bound to come in here at some point,” she said. “We need to get the hostages and get out of here so we can meet the CIA helicopter.”

Silently, Elizabeth nodded, and they started running. It would be a long time before she was ready to speak again.

* * *

The gate fired up forty-three minutes after John had led the rescue team off-world. The IDC that came through the gate was John’s, and he was also signaling a medical emergency incoming.

“Lower the shield!” Ellie yelled, already running to the stairs into the gate room. She tapped her earpiece. “Beckett, this is Dr. Bartlet. Send a medical team to the gate room as quickly as possible.”

The event horizon stabilized within the gate, and the strike team started walking through. John was among the first, his arm around Elizabeth’s waist. Elizabeth offered Ellie a weary smile. As for Ellie, she was grinning in relief, and looking around for Marcus. He came through within a few seconds, supported on either side by the two sergeants on his team.

“Marcus?” she said, and the room got very quiet as the gate shut down.

“Ellie,” he replied, raising his head.

Her eyes widened and her smile fell at the sight of the bruises on his face. A medical team rushed in from one of the side entrances, bringing gurneys with them, and before Ellie could process any of it, Marcus was being hoisted onto one of them and rushed away. All she could do was watch.

The others from the group, still able to walk unassisted, lingered behind for a moment, and Elizabeth touched her arm. Ellie looked at her and said, “He was beaten, wasn’t he? All of you were.”

Elizabeth nodded. “He probably saved my life, Ellie,” she replied. “He’ll pull through.”

One of the medics led Elizabeth away then, and John came up next to Ellie, his arms crossed over his chest. “You okay?” he asked.

She exhaled audibly. “I will be.”

He touched her shoulder. “Head on down to the infirmary,” he said gently. “I’ll hold down the fort here for a while, till they’re done with Elizabeth.”

Ellie started to go, but as she reached the step down she turned around. “John?”

“Yeah?” He had just reached the main stairs.

“Thank you,” she said. “I know how difficult the last month has been, but. . . thank you. For everything.”

He smiled disarmingly and waved her off. “Go see your boyfriend.”

* * *

_The White House_

Jed had sent a car to Andrews Air Force Base to pick up Elizabeth as soon as the military plane she was on had landed, and within a few minutes of being notified of her team’s safe return, she walked into the Oval Office. She looked incredibly tired, but there was a resolve on her face which, if he were honest, was just a little scary.

Mrs. Landingham closed the door behind Elizabeth, leaving Jed alone with the young woman. “Can I get you something to drink?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” she said, her voice low.

“It’s good to see you in one piece, Elizabeth,” he said, and he meant it. He hadn’t slept in the thirty-six hours since finding out that she’d gone missing, and he’d spent almost all of it wondering if he’d sent her – his protégé – to her death.

“Thank you, sir.”

Her quietness, so uncharacteristic of her, was unnerving, and he had to break the tension somehow. “Elizabeth, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry to have put you in this position,” he began. “The CIA director was less than forthcoming about the likelihood of success on this mission–”

“The mission was successful,” she interrupted.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Brizuela’s dead.” She finally looked him in the eye. “I assume that was the mission.”

“The CIA hasn’t confirmed that–”

“I shot him, sir.” Jed’s eyes widened, and she continued, “He was about to kill your operative, and I shot him.”

“Elizabeth,” he said, feeling like he’d just been kicked in the chest, “I’m so sorry.”

“You should be,” she said, a rough edge to her voice that Jed had never heard. “You should be ashamed of this. Did you even once think about the consequences of this? Of using the United Nations as a cover for an _assassination_?”

Her voice was rising, and Jed could hear and see her anger bubbling up to the surface, along with a hefty dose of betrayal. “Elizabeth, you were there to rescue people,” he tried to point out.

“But I didn’t! They were dead before I got there!” She was yelling by this point. “They knew about Kate, or whatever her real name is. Did it not occur to you that these people have a better network than we do in South America? You made me think I was doing this to save lives! You _knew_ I’d do this to help innocent people. You lied to the United Nations.”

“Elizabeth-”

“You _used_ me!” she screamed. “What gives you the right to do that? What the hell gives you the right?”

And suddenly Elizabeth closed her eyes, and her shoulders shook as she sobbed audibly. She sank into the chair behind her, near the fireplace, and Jed just stood there, his hands in his pockets. This would have been incredibly awkward under any circumstances, but with Elizabeth, he had no words to describe how heinous his own actions – or inactions – had been. He had never realized before now that he could ruin someone so easily, and he could only hope that his friend was as strong as he believed.

He walked up to her slowly and touched her shoulder, but she recoiled from him. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said through her tears.

“No,” he replied. “This was my doing. My carelessness.”

“Sir, I. . .” She shook her head and didn’t finish her sentence, even though she started wiping her eyes.

“Do you have a place you can stay tonight?” Jed asked, not liking the thought of her alone in a hotel room in this state. “Someone you can call?”

Elizabeth nodded. “Thièrry Ducret.”

Jed raised a brow, but walked to the door and asked Mrs. Landingham to place a call to the French ambassador. A few minutes of remarkably uncomfortable silence later, the phone beeped, and Jed walked to his desk to turn the speakerphone on. “Hello, Mr. Ambassador,” he said.

“Mr. President,” the ambassador replied. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“I have someone here who’d like to speak to you.”

He looked up at Elizabeth, who stood up and sniffled. To Jed’s surprise, she picked up the telephone when she reached the desk and said, “ _Thièrry, c’est Élisée_.” She then proceeded to babble on in such rapid French that he was hopelessly lost, even without hearing the other side of the conversation. Her voice was shaking, and more than once she had to dry her eyes. Jed wandered away from the desk, strangely feeling hurt that right now, she trusted him so little that she wouldn’t even speak in English in front of him. Still, he knew he had no right to feel hurt.

“He’s sending someone,” she said, hanging up the phone.

A small part of him wanted to know how she knew Thièrry Ducret, but he held his tongue on that matter. “Do you want to wait here?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I can wait at the Ellipse.”

“Okay.”

She didn’t wait to be dismissed, and Jed didn’t try to stop her from leaving. At this point, he just had to hope that she might eventually forgive him for what he’d done.

He took a moment to collect himself, and he stepped into Leo’s office to deliver the news that Brizuela was dead.

* * *

By the time John had finished a good portion of the post-mission material and contacted Earth to inform Admiral Harper of the rescue, Elizabeth had already been released from the infirmary. He found her in their bedroom, sitting in front of a floor-to-ceiling window, knees hugged to her chest and rocking back and forth. He’d seen her like this once before, during the first year, after the first time she’d been held hostage. None of them that night had wanted to be alone, and he and Elizabeth had sat in the control room, shoulders and hips almost touching as they talked about everything and nothing.

He did the same now, kicking off his shoes, sitting next to her, and looking out upon the city and the sea. It was starting to rain, and they were likely to have flooding problems on the south pier in the morning. Since the siege, they still hadn’t managed to find all the leaks down there and fix them. But that wasn’t John’s most pressing concern tonight.

He exhaled slowly and said, “It isn’t easy, you know.”

She looked at him, finally acknowledging that he was there, and for a long time they just stared at each other. Since the beginning, they’d found that they didn’t always need to speak to each other in order to communicate, but Elizabeth’s eyes were hard to read now. They both had their walls, built up to protect themselves from the past and the future. In his mind, John had built a wall around her, too – a reminder to himself that she had an innocence he’d long since lost, and that was most sacred, perhaps even more sacred than her physical safety.

And now it was gone. In the unforgiving moonlight, he could see it on her face, in lines a little more pronounced than they actually were, or hair that appeared grey when it wasn’t really.

“The first time you have to kill someone, in self-defense or because you’re ordered to,” he clarified. “It’s never easy, but it’s hardest then.”

When she spoke, her voice was low, and she wouldn’t look at him. “This wasn’t the first time.”

Goosebumps raised on John’s arms as the room grew colder, and he stared at her in horror. “ _When_?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Almost fifteen years ago. I. . . can’t tell you any more.”

“What the hell?”

“It’s code-word classified,” she explained.

“I have code-word clearance for all of this,” he said, waving out toward a window. How was it possible that he could be so high up in a mission like Atlantis and not have clearance to know the circumstances in which his wife had once killed someone?

“But you don’t have clearance for this code word,” Elizabeth replied, sounding infinitely patient and tired. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you.”

John knew, at least on an intellectual level, that Elizabeth had spent a lot of her previous career in dangerous places. She’d told him once that she’d been in more war zones than he had, and that was true. He remembered the look on her face after she’d shot the man, and the way she’d clung to him. For the first time in years he’d misread her. She hadn’t been pushed to a completely foreign place in her humanity. She’d been forced back down a road she had already taken, and from the looks of it, it had horrified her enough the first time.

She was crying now, tears streaking down her face, and she didn’t try to stop it. “I just kept working after the first time,” she said. “I couldn’t let myself stop to think about what I did. The nightmares. . . I didn’t want to sleep for a long time.”

“I know the feeling,” John replied, truthfully.

“Is that how we both ended up married to our jobs before we married each other?”

He almost smiled at the tone of dry wit in her voice. It was good to hear that. “Probably,” he replied. “At least we’ve got something in common.”

She almost laughed. Almost. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “The first time, I couldn’t believe I was capable of it, even in defense.”

“And now you’ve had to do it again.” John put his hand on her knee. “You were forced into this, Elizabeth. You didn’t have a choice.”

“How can you say that?” she asked. “Sure, my other option was to let them kill us, but I had a choice. I chose to pull the trigger.”

“Elizabeth,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

It was the difference, he supposed, between their backgrounds. He was trained to follow orders, which was supposed to absolve him. In giving unsavory orders, he was able to say that it was a time of war, and that protecting the innocent often meant that he couldn’t keep his hands clean. He had training that would shield him.

But Elizabeth was different. Despite being a politician – and a good one, at that – she’d developed a strong sense of personal responsibility, and every time she’d been forced into a decision she didn’t want to make, she’d taken it as her own. It was a kind of leadership John could admire, even if he didn’t always agree with it.

He put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him. Soldier and diplomat. War and peace. They never should have clicked together in any sense, romantic or otherwise, but in their differences they found commonality. They found a way to work together, and love wasn’t far behind.

It was, perhaps, that love which kept him from recoiling from her now. He’d done worse things and she knew it, but she’d never pushed him away. The least he could do now was return the favor.

“I missed you,” he said, kissing the top of her head and saying so much more than that.

Elizabeth rested her hand on the inside of his knee. “I missed you too.”

“Have you seen Peter and Siah yet?”

“They were asleep,” she replied. “I didn’t want to wake them.”

John nodded, knowing he’d want to take care of that first thing in the morning. Over the last month, they’d become increasingly concerned over their mother’s absence, even though he’d never actually told them that she was missing. He would never have known how to explain it.

But for tonight, his only concern was Elizabeth.

He got to his feet, holding his hands out to help her up. They stood there at the window, just staring at each other for a moment, until he touched her face and her hair, and he kissed her. She was still crying at first, but eventually the kiss grew more passionate, and all that mattered for now was that she was alive, and she was home.

John pulled away first, his fingers still entwined in her wet curls. She was breathing hard, her eyebrows slightly raised as she looked at him, as though asking him a question. Her eyes were still dark, as before, but no longer hard to read.

As they stood there, he pushed off her jacket and his own, tossing them to a nearby chair. Taking her hand, he led her to their bed.

After a while, they talked again, of Mabirra and somewhere in South America. When Elizabeth fell asleep at last, she was in John’s arms.

* * *

_The Pentagon_

Admiral Fitzwallace called Kate into his Pentagon office the morning after her return from Peru. This was not an uncommon occurrence for her, but given the events of the last forty-eight hours, she felt more nervous than she usually would have.

“Lieutenant,” he said upon her entrance, “good to see you alive and well.”

“Thank you, sir,” she replied. “I have to admit, there were some close calls this time.”

“So I’ve gathered,” he said. “The president called me last night. He’d just talked with Dr. Weir.”

“What did she say?”

“Well, she was pretty pissed at him for the whole thing.”

“That much I’d gathered.”

“And she said Brizuela’s dead.” Fitzwallace leaned forward, arms resting on his desk. “She said she shot him.”

Kate nodded slowly. “It’s true. Brizuela was about to kill me. She did it to save me.”

The admiral took a long time answering. “That’s a lot of personal guilt to put on someone like her.”

“I know,” Kate replied. “I feel terrible about it. I went into this thinking I could help people by taking out someone like Brizuela, someone that cruel. And I think I just wrecked a person’s life instead.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I just. . .” She sighed. “I think of all the dictators in Africa who started off as school teachers. Then something happened and something in them just. . . snapped. I got to talk with her some on this trip. That kind of person doesn’t come along in every generation, and I may have ruined her. I don’t want to be responsible for breaking someone that special, or turning her into something horrible.”

“Did you offer to talk to her?” Fitz asked.

Kate nodded. “She wasn’t too keen on the idea.”

“That’s a shame,” he replied, “because there isn’t going to be anyone else she can talk to, and she doesn’t know your real name and can’t contact you.”

“How highly is this mission going to be classified?” she asked.

“High,” the admiral said. “Higher than it would be under normal circumstances. She’s a good friend of the president. He wants to make sure this doesn’t jeopardize her career, and we certainly don’t want the media finding out about it.”

“I agree,” Kate replied. “But this is going to make things a lot harder on her.”

“That it is.”

There was a knock on the door, and the admiral’s secretary stuck her head in. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, “but your ten o’clock is here.”

“Thanks, Alice,” he replied. As she closed the door, he said, “Thank you for stopping in, Lieutenant.”

“My pleasure, sir.”

As the days went by, she thought more than once about finding Elizabeth and talking to her about it. The whole matter was bothering her far more than Kate had ever anticipated. Nevertheless, she resisted the urge to pick up the phone or get on a plane, knowing that Elizabeth just wanted to be left alone after all this. The last thing Kate wanted to do was push her further than she already had.

Instead, before she could be given her next undercover assignment, she resigned from the CIA. She wasn’t doing this to another human being.

* * *

Elizabeth awoke the next morning to bright sunlight and kisses on her shoulder. For the first time in four weeks, she was warm and comfortable, her whole body relaxed.

“Elizabeth,” said her husband, and she rolled to her back to see him sitting beside her on the bed, fully dressed.

“Hi,” she said, utter relief flooding her that the events of the previous night hadn’t been a dream.

“Good morning,” John replied. “How are you feeling?”

She smiled. “Better.”

“Good.” He kissed her nose and then her mouth, before holding out her robe. “Here, put this on,” he said. “I’ve got a surprise.”

“I have to move?” she asked, knowing she sounded pathetic.

He grinned. “Well, I like you best naked, but yeah, you have to move.”

After another kiss, he got up and jogged out of the room, leaving Elizabeth to stand up long enough to put her robe on and readjust the pillows so she could sit comfortably. Then the door into the boys’ bedroom opened up, and Peter and Siah cried, “Mommy!”

They ran and climbed onto the bed, and Elizabeth was so happy to see them that she didn’t even scold Siah for running on the bed. She was crying, but this time it was from the sheer joy of seeing her sons again. There was much hugging and kissing, and then Josiah said, “Mommy, you were gone a long time.”

He looked very serious, and Elizabeth was struck all over again at how much he looked like his father. It was just as futile to try to flatten his hair, but she tried it anyway. “I know, baby,” she said. “I missed you both so much.”

“Are you staying?” Peter asked.

Elizabeth nodded. “Yes, Peter, I’m staying.”

John came back in then, balancing a large tray of food. “I thought we’d have breakfast in bed today,” he announced. So they did.

After breakfast, when she was able to slip away for a few minutes, she headed off in search of Ellie. Conventional wisdom would have made her check the control room first, but instead Elizabeth headed to the infirmary. When she came in, Carson came up to her and said, “How are you this morning, Doctor?”

“Doing well, all things considered,” she replied with a brief smile. “Is Ellie here?”

“Aye,” the doctor said. “She was here all night.”

“Somehow, I’m not surprised,” Elizabeth said. “How’s Colonel Lorne?”

“He was bleeding internally, as you suspected,” Beckett replied. “He had some cracked ribs as well. We had to operate on him last night. Ellie’s not left his side since he got out of surgery, poor thing. But he’s stable now.”

Elizabeth nodded and pointed at a bed surrounded by privacy screens. “There, I take it?” she asked.

“Aye.”

She walked over quietly and stepped behind one of the screens. Lorne was unconscious, and Ellie was sitting beside him, holding his hand. “Hello,” Elizabeth said softly.

Ellie jumped and looked over her shoulder. “Elizabeth! I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

“I managed to get away for a minute,” she replied, smiling. “How are you?”

“Tired,” Ellie said. “You?”

“Right now, grateful.” Elizabeth came up and put her hand on Ellie’s shoulder. “John’s told me about the last few weeks. He says you handled all this with a lot of poise.”

Ellie shook her head. “I was ten seconds from crying most of the time.”

“The key is to always be ten seconds away,” Elizabeth replied. “When you start getting closer than that, you’re in trouble.”

Ellie laughed a little. “I suppose.”

Ellie leaned against Elizabeth a little. “I’m grateful to him, too,” Elizabeth added, knowing she didn’t need to specify. “He probably saved my life.”

“He has that habit,” Ellie said, laying her hand over Elizabeth’s on her shoulder.

“A lot of this was your first real test,” Elizabeth mused. “I’m sorry you got thrown in the fire like this, but from all accounts, you did well, even though it was Marcus who was involved.”

“Does it get any easier?”

Elizabeth actually had to think about that one, and she took so long to answer that Ellie looked up at her. “No,” she finally decided. “No, it doesn’t get easier, but it does get more and more worth it.”

On the bed, Lorne started to wake up, and Elizabeth extricated herself. “I’ll leave you two alone,” she said, but Ellie didn’t answer. Her attention was wholly on Marcus.

Elizabeth turned away. “Ellie?” she heard him say.

“Hi,” Ellie replied, as Elizabeth was walking away.

* * *

_The White House_

Over the next few months, Elizabeth did most of her work out of her office in New York instead of traveling around the world as much as she had been before Peru. But eventually she was asked to go to the Philippines, to accompany a group from Doctors Without Borders. She had to bite her tongue not to ask whether or not the CIA had its fingers in this mission, but she agreed to it.

A day before her scheduled departure, she came to a reception at the White House, the first time she’d been there since screaming at the President and breaking down in tears. He stopped by the reception briefly, and his personal aide soon asked her to step out of the party, as the President wished to speak to her.

“I understand you’re off to the Philippines soon,” he said without preamble when she entered the Oval Office.

“Yes, sir,” Elizabeth replied. “I’m surprised you know about that.”

“Well, I hope you’ll be careful,” he said. “And I promise you, the CIA has nothing to do with this trip. I’m still looking for a publicly acceptable reason to fire the director.”

She shook her head. “I trust you, Mr. President.”

Bartlet visibly relaxed. “You don’t know how relieved I am to hear that, Elizabeth.”

“Sir,” Elizabeth replied, shaking her head, “I want to apologize for the last time I was here. I never should have come in so angry.”

“No, it was completely deserved,” he said. “I was pretty damn careless with a lot of lives during that.”

“Yes, sir, you were.”

“Well,” he replied, clearing his throat, “I just wanted to wish you a safe trip.”

“Thank you, sir,” she replied.

“Oh, I’m heading to Manchester tomorrow morning,” he said as she was on her way to the door. “You want to come up and see Abbey and the girls? Liz is having her second baby any day now.”

Elizabeth turned around, amused. “Sir, I’m catching a plane to Manila in the morning,” she said. “Besides, your family doesn’t much like me.”

“That’s not true,” he objected.

“With all due respect, Mr. President,” she said, laughing, “ask Ellie. She can explain.”

“Oh, go on,” he replied, shooing her out with a wave and a smile.

Three weeks and one hostage situation later, Elizabeth had discovered that she really could still do the work she loved, and that maybe someday it wouldn’t feel so tainted by Peru anymore. And in the course of it all, she discovered that Jed Bartlet was still her ready friend and ally.

* * *

  
A month passed peacefully in Atlantis, with normal activity and minor fires and people returning to active duty, before Elizabeth’s world turned upside down again. Despite the fact that they were both in the middle of work hours, she headed off to find John as soon as she knew for certain, finding him in the armory, doing inventory with some of his staff.

“John?” she said, coming in. “John, where are you?”

“Up here!” he called back, and Elizabeth looked up to see him at the top of a ladder. What he was doing up there, she had no idea. “Cranton, that box of ammunition goes over on the middle shelf,” he said as he started down.

“John–”

“And Hicks, bring me that tablet–”

“John, I’m pregnant.”

He missed a rung on the ladder and gracelessly slid the rest of the way down. As he stared at her, she said, “Hi.”

“Wow,” he replied, blinking several times. Elizabeth couldn’t help but smile at how quickly the room cleared out. “How’d that happen?”

She raised a brow. “A month without birth control pills,” she said. “And it’s not like either of us was thinking about that kind of thing when I got back.”

“Wow,” John repeated, closing the distance between them and resting his hand against her abdomen. “Really?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth replied, rolling her eyes.

“Well,” he said, “I guess this is just about the best thing that could come of that mess.”

“I think so too.”

A long silence passed, and Elizabeth began to wonder why he didn’t kiss her or something. He’d been overjoyed when they’d found out for sure about Josiah, and they were actually trying with him. As she watched him now, however, she could tell that his mind was racing, and there was a hint of sadness in his eyes.

“I guess it’s time,” he finally said.

“Time?” she repeated.

“Time for us to leave Atlantis,” he elaborated, still staring at her abdomen. “When you were missing, I kept thinking I couldn’t put myself through this again. I couldn’t risk it, especially for the boys’ sake. Now with this. . . It’s time to go home.”

“Home” had been an elusive concept for them in the last several years. Their home planet was in many ways unfamiliar, but they didn’t completely belong in the Pegasus galaxy either. They had left Earth and made a home for themselves in Atlantis, but she knew that the time had come for them to bring it full circle, leaving Atlantis to make a home for their family on Earth. And the time was swiftly approaching for Elizabeth to step up to what was next.

Slowly, she nodded. “Yes. It’s time.”

The news of their imminent departure spread almost as fast as the news of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, and for the next week, they had a steady stream of both congratulations and regrets. No one questioned their decision to leave Atlantis, but nearly everyone was sorry to see them go.

Someone – Elizabeth strongly suspected Laura Cadman, but said nothing – organized a huge farewell party for them on the night before their departure. The Athosians brought them many gifts as a gesture of thanks and well wishes for their years of friendship. Teyla raised a toast for them that left hardly a dry eye in the city, and even Caldwell said in front of everyone that the city would be a little less for their absence.

And on the next morning, John and Elizabeth gathered their belongings and their children in the gate room. Ellie and Marcus were there to see them off. “It’ll be about six weeks before Dr. Kendall arrives,” Elizabeth told them, “though I’m sure General Caldwell will do his best to get the _Daedalus_ there and back as quickly as possible. I’m sure you’ll do just fine as interim commander.”

“I think we’ll be fine,” Ellie replied.

Elizabeth smiled. “That’s why I wanted you in this job.”

“I don’t understand something, ma’am,” Lorne said. “Why isn’t Ellie taking your job?”

“Politics, Colonel, politics,” Elizabeth replied. “‘The slow boring of hard boards.’ Jordan’s only agreed to a two-year stint, so Ellie’s going to have the job soon enough.”

John came running down the stairs as the gate activated. “We got everything?” he said. “No one left their toothbrush?”

Elizabeth remembered the thrill she’d felt when they’d first set out on this mission, eight years earlier. That feeling was coming back, and she grasped Josiah’s hand. “We’re ready,” she said.

“Ma’am?” Lorne said.

“Yes?”

“What I said last year still stands,” he replied. “I’ll be voting for you.”

With the wormhole established, Elizabeth smiled. “It’s been an honor to serve with you, Colonel.”

John punched in his IDC, and they walked toward the puddle with their children, a few Marines on leave helping to move their boxes and bags. With the applause of those they were leaving behind, they stepped into the Milky Way.

Admiral Harper was waiting at the bottom of the ramp in the SGC’s gate room, and Elizabeth and John came down as quickly as possible, letting the others through behind. John saluted, which Kate returned, and then she shook Elizabeth’s hand. “Welcome back to Earth,” she said. “I understand congratulations are in order.”

“Yes, ma’am,” John said, grinning while the boys looked around curiously. Siah was straining on Elizabeth’s grip, trying to get away to explore his new surroundings. “She’s about a month along.”

Kate smiled in return. “The program won’t be the same without you, but I’m happy for you both.”

She then directed them all to the infirmary, as was standard procedure at the SGC. John went ahead with the boys, but Elizabeth lingered behind. “Kate,” she said, “about fifteen years ago, you offered to talk to me.”

Kate looked at her sharply, obviously startled. In all the dealings they’d had in the year since President Santos had given Kate command of the SGC, neither Kate nor Elizabeth had mentioned Peru. “What about it?” Kate asked, frowning.

“I think we should,” Elizabeth replied. “I think it’s time to put some things to rest. I need to move on.”

Kate nodded slowly. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Elizabeth repeated. As she walked toward the infirmary, she already felt like a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders, and that anything that came her way in the future would be easy in comparison.

Besides, she reflected, upon seeing John with Peter and Josiah in the infirmary, she’d been all but alone back then. She was far from alone now.


End file.
